Opposition leaders today sharply criticised the Taoiseach’s Cabinet reshuffle and what they saw as a failure to remove ministers who were involved in “crashing the Irish economy”.
All party leaders were particularly scathing of the retention of Minister for Health Mary Harney.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny described the changes as a “mishmash”. Some 430,000 people are unemployed, “but not a single Minister has lost a job here despite the fact that these were the drivers of our economy onto the rocks over the last number of years,” he said.
"You have a dysfunctional health system where people are actually afraid to go to the hospitals that are supposed to look after them, this kind of situation is one where warning signs went unheeded.”
He said Minister for Health Mary Harney continued in her job when she had a “proven rigidity in terms of approach at a time when a radical change was needed to shift emphasis and effect and impact in the department of health”.
“We have a line-up of Ministers who have failed in their departments, some of whom have become a byword for inaction and incompetence. You have made some changes with the Tánaiste shifting downwards to the department of education and the Minister for Social and Family Affairs moving somewhere else . . . and the former minister for education moving closer to yourself.”
Mr Kenny said: "This is undoubtedly the worst Government in the history of the State and one, which your motion hopes to keep virtually intact. . . . It is the same group of Ministers who have presided over the country’s slide into deep recession.”
Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said “Fianna Fáil and their most recent sidekicks, the Green Party, have behaved like princelings, carving up the spoils of power between them."
He added: “Only a group of people so transfixed by their own delusions of grandeur, their own sense of superiority, would have the arrogance to believe a shuffling of the deck is all that our country needs now.”
“Our country needs a new Government, not a substitution from its own benches.’’
Minister for the Environment John Gormley said there was a space now where the innovative renewed programme for government could be implemented.
He said its emphasis was on dealing with unemployment, which was a crisis particularly for young people. “The way that you deal with this is by facing up to reality and taking the hard decisions,’’ he added.
Sinn Féin Dáil leader Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin said the reshuffled Fianna Fáil/Green Cabinet “is set on the same course to disaster that they have steered since they joined together in June 2007".
"There will clearly be no change in health policy. Minister Harney is staying on, prolonging her tenure in office where she has made an already inequitable health service even more inequitable and where has promoted for profit privatisation and ruthless centralisation.”