Opposition parties have reacted strongly to Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan’s Budget 2011 by saying it does not provide enough stimulus measures for the economy and that middle and lower-income earners are hardest hit.
Fine Gael’s finance spokesman Michael Noonan said it is the budget of a “puppet government” doing what they are told to do by the IMF and ECB so the State can draw down bailout funds.
Speaking the Dáil after the Minister for Finance delivered his budget speech Mr Noonan said it was “in an ironic way, a fitting tribute to this failed administration”.
Mr Noonan also accused Mr Lenihan of not learning the lesson that “one cannot cut and tax ones way out of a recession” before adding the Government’s “slash and burn policies” are counter-productive.
He said there is “not a single progressive idea to support investment and get our country growing again” and that it had undermined any “concept of social justice in our society”.
Mr Noonan said called for reform of the political system and said new policies to faith and jobs to the Irish economy were needed.
Referring to the €10 cut in the child benefit for the first and second child and by €20 for the third child, Mr Noonan questioned the minister why only the cut applied to third children.
“Minister what have you got against third children? The fourth child won’t be cut, the fifth child won’t be cut, the 16th child won’t be cut…did some third child beat you up coming home from school as a young fella?” he asked.
Mr Noonan added that overall the Budget is “incoherent”, seeks to “tie the hand of its successors”, and is “soft on the rich and hard on the poor.”
Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said the Budget was as “every bit as bad as we feared.”
"Labour fully accepts the need to reduce public expenditure and the close the budget deficit, but in this budget Fianna Fáil has once again, chosen to take the route of the conservative consensus, asking those on middle and low incomes to bear the brunt of the adjustment, while privileged elites such as the tax exiles did not even merit a mention in Mr Lenihan's speech," he said.
"There is little or nothing to promote job creation and training and the few token measures included in the budget speech will make no dent in the live register figures.
"The cuts in social welfare rates were well flagged and will create real hardship for those on the lowest levels of income, particularly for groups such as widows, the blind and carers. The alternative approach, as advocated by the Labour Party, would have been to ask couples earning over €200,000 per year and individuals earning more than €100,000 to make a modest extra contribution in taxes," he added.
Mr Gilmore said the cuts in pay for the Taoiseach and Ministers are welcome, but said it was "significant" that nothing has been done in terms of reforming the ministerial pension regime.
Labour’s Joan Burton said Mr Lenihan’s referral to households and businesses having to work off the excesses of the boom makes the cuts sound like “a walk in the park sometime after Christmas dinner”.
She described the Budget as the “last sting of a dying wasp” and that working people and people on middle income are the ones dong all the “heavy lifting”.
Ms Burton said the cuts being borne by people with children are the biggest of all and that is a comment on how little political power women have compared to bankers. “There is enough austerity in today’s announcement to make even the most ardent Tea Party fan grin in delight," she said.
She said the interest rate with the IMF needed to be renegotiated. "The winners in today's budget are the banks who hoovered up our money as well as developers and property tycoons. The losers are a family with three children who will lose €40 a month in child benefit, people on disability benefit who will lose €8 a week and carers who will also lose €8 a week," she added. "Ireland will be more divided than ever after this budget".
Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty said the Budget has “prolonged the cycle of recession”.
He said the Government has repeatedly “misled” the people and called on everyone in the House to commit to a reversal of the budgetary cuts ahead of the next election.
He said: “What is disgusting about all of this is when the whole country is demanding political reform this government is relying on the votes of two gombeen politicians, willing to sell the Irish people for a casino in Tipperary and nursing home in Kerry…we can’t afford this type of politics anymore.”
“We can’t afford the banking policy, we can’t afford this loan from the IMF and the EU and most importantly we can’t afford you as a Government,” he added.
And he said the Irish taxpayer should not be “the insurance policy to the bondholders who took a gamble”.
“How are people supposed to live on the amounts announced by this Government?
“If less money is spent the economy will contract, more jobs will be lost and more people will be reliant on social welfare as a result.
“Any TD who votes for these cuts deserves to be kicked out at the next election,” Mr Doherty added.