FINE GAEL’S economic plan is quite similar to the Government’s four-year plan, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan said yesterday.
However, Fine Gael’s policy to reduce the numbers employed in the public sector by a further 16,000 was not realistic, Mr Lenihan said.
“That will affect frontline services. I doubt there are thousands of faceless bureaucrats that can be summarily dismissed by an incoming government. It is simply wrong,” he said.
“The idea there is €5 billion out there that needs to be plucked off the trees like ripe fruit and eliminated is a complete expenditure illusion,” he said.
Speaking at a Fianna Fáil news conference on fiscal policy yesterday, Mr Lenihan said: “It’s axiomatic that the bulk of tax proposals in the Fine Gael plan are derivable from Fianna Fáil’s four-year plan,” he said.
However, he said there were several aspects of the Fine Gael policy that did not stand up to scrutiny. Its rejection of a site valuation tax to be replaced by unspecified local government charges was cynical, he said. He also criticised plans to impose a levy on pensions and to increase the top rate of VAT to 22 per cent a year earlier than is earmarked in the Government’s four-year plan.