Deal aims to save FF and Greens, Opposition claims

OPPOSITION LEADERS:THE REVISED Programme for Government was not a programme for national recovery, but one for the survival of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, Opposition leaders said yesterday.

“Fear of the electorate and a sense of desperation” over Nama were the overriding motives behind endorsement of the programme, according to Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny.

Mr Kenny said desperation resulted in the Green Party “foisting a €54,000 million debt burden onto the shoulders of current and future generations of Irish people.”

“This policy of paying over market value for distressed assets was described by Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, as ‘criminal’. As a result of the decision today by the Green Party, it is the Irish taxpayer who is going to be the victim of this ‘criminal’ policy,” said Mr Kenny.

Mr Kenny described the new programme for government as “a sticking plaster solution over a festering boil and that this is the most incompetent Government in Irish history”.

The Labour Party said it was not surprising a deal was “cobbled together . . . as an election would be a recipe for mutually assured destruction”. But Labour Party deputy leader Joan Burton said many elements of the revised programme were replicated from the original programme while Green Party demands for a single tier health system or an additional tax rate “have been abandoned altogether”.

“Others have been watered down to such an extent as to be virtually meaningless,” she maintained. “For instance while there is a commitment not to reintroduce third-level fees, Fianna Fáil has made it clear that they intend to force students and their families to pay for third-level education – fees will now simply be reintroduced by the back door, using a different term,” she said.

Labour’s health spokeswoman Jan O’Sullivan said the Green Party had “totally surrendered control of health policy to the current Minister for Health, Mary Harney.”

“Two weeks ago we were told that the introduction of a new single tier health system would be a crucial demand for the Greens, but all we have got in the revised programme is a commitment to more of the same Mary Harney policies that has given us a two-tier health system that is both expensive and inefficient,” she said.

Speaking on the RTÉ News at One yesterday, Minister for Social and Family Affairs Mary Hanafin said the programme “was an agreement about jobs, [and a] €500 million innovation fund”.

While she said the €58 million-a-day budget for social welfare “cannot go untouched in some way” in attempts to save €4 billion, other departments would be considered too.

“Social welfare will be the last thing we will look at,” she insisted.