Taoiseach Brian Cowen was today accused of taking cash from the most vulnerable people in Ireland while pouring billions of euro into a black hole of banks.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said last week’s slash and burn Budget was palpably unfair and mean for the country’s blind, carers and disabled.
Welfare payment cuts for the recipients would make up €108 million — when €175 million could be saved by cutbacks to quangos, already recommended in the McCarthy Report, he said.
“You’re Government has taken out the political gun to the most vulnerable — the blind, the carers and the disabled,” said Mr Kenny.
In an emotive attack on the Taoiseach, the Fine Gael leader said he wasn’t the man he once knew, who had a genuine feeling for the voiceless and for those with no trade union or representation.
Turning to Government ministers, he said: “Every Government minister with any gumption should be ashamed of themselves to walk up those steps and vote for that.”
Ahead of tomorrow’s vote on social welfare cuts, Mr Kenny urged a U-turn on plans to cut €8.60 a week from the income of the social welfare payments before Christmas.
The blind and disabled cannot work because of their circumstances while carers save the State hundreds of millions of euro a year, the Fine Gael leader said.
“Yet you pump hundreds of thousands of millions into a black hole of banks and you allow people to walk away with pensions of over €100,000 untouched,” he raged.
“There can be nothing in our so-called Christian country that is as unfair.”
Insisting it was easy for the Opposition leader to suggest there were easier ways, Mr Cowen said it was impossible to draw up the Budget without social welfare cuts.
But he argued the drop in the cost of living over the past year effectively cancelled out the cuts.
“The cost of living is back at the rate it was in February 2007, yet we have welfare payments even after that cut at 2008 levels,” he said.
“I recognise that any reduction in rates of social welfare is disappointing for those in receipt of them, but we made this decision out of the necessity to ensure we have a social welfare code going into the future.”
PA