CONFRONTING THE economic realities facing the State will necessitate public sector pay and social welfare cuts in December’s budget, Taoiseach Brian Cowen has indicated.
Speaking at Fianna Fáil’s annual Wolfe Tone commemoration in Bodenstown, Co Kildare, yesterday, Mr Cowen said that no economic or social interest could absent itself from the effort to achieve stability in the country’s finances and begin the path to economic recovery.
“No economic or social interest can be beyond the scope of the painful adjustments which are now required,” he said during his address to some 300 party members at the Co Kildare graveyard.
Asked later was he referring to cuts in public sector pay and social welfare, Mr Cowen said: “If we look at this in a traditional way, where you simply cut the provision of the services themselves, the level of adjustment that that will represent would denude our public services to an extent that would not be publicly acceptable. People who depend on public services, we have to protect them to the best extent that we can,” he said.
During his address, Mr Cowen said the framing and passing of the upcoming budget, where cuts of some €4 billion will be made, would present the Government with its biggest challenge since it came into office.
“Let there be no mistake, our hard-won sovereignty now depends on our having the wisdom and courage to take the necessary decisions which will secure the financial stability of our State,” he said.
Echoing the warnings on the economy, expressed by a number of Ministers in the past week, he said: “The decision will be taken in the context of the most serious crisis in our public finances. The simple facts of our dilemma are easily understood by every citizen and every household. The gap between revenue and spending has increased dramatically.”
The other major theme of the Taoiseach’s speech was the Northern peace process and the threat posed by what he described as the “evil murderers” of the splinter republican paramilitary groups.
“There remain a tiny minority who remain deaf to the will of the Irish people and blind to the unalterable peaceful path of our history,” Mr Cowen said.
“These people are sometimes called dissident republicans but they are no such thing. They are evil murderers whose actions and objectives could not be further removed from the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.”
He said that that evil was demonstrated earlier this year with the murders of a police officer and two soldiers, and further displays of violence in the past week.
Mr Cowen also pointed to the passing of the Lisbon Treaty, which he said was a defining moment in this country’s participation in the European Union.
“It is now time for the treaty to come into force, so that the more efficient and more democratic European Union can be allowed to function,” he said, by way of an inference to delays by Czech president Václav Klaus in ratifying the document.