The Government remains on track to exit the EU-IMF programme next year and “send the troika home”, Tánaiste and Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore said yesterday.
Mr Gilmore said this week’s budget “will be tough” but, after it, “85 per cent of the adjustment we have to do will be behind us: the end is in sight”.
He said his was the only government that would see it through, “not Fine Gael supported by a rag-bag of right-wing independents; not Fianna Fáil, now tripping over themselves to disown policies that they signed up to; not Sinn Féin and their fantasy economics”.
In relation to the bailout programme, he said: “The troika are interested in only one thing: an Ireland that can pay its way. So let’s finish with them and send them home and that’s exactly what we will do in 2013.”
‘Confident’
Mr Gilmore was speaking at the Labour Party’s centennial conference in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. He later told reporters he was “confident” of Ireland finishing with the troika next year.
“Our intention is to be out of the programme by the end of 2013, to send the troika home, to recover control of our own financial affairs. That was the objective the Government set itself when [it] was formed in February of last year and we’re on target to meet that deadline.”
The event at the Hotel Minella in Clonmel was picketed by protesters.