Sir, - I do not often consider it worthwhile to reply to the arguments of Dr Garret FitzGerald in his more tendentious mode. Although an exTaoiseach, he can be and is meant to be a somewhat independent columnist, but, having this close to an election, reverted to form, he deserves a political response.
Over the past 10 years, Fianna Fail has a record of controlling public expenditure second to none. Between 1987 and 1990, Ray MacSharry, principally, cut expenditure as a percentage of GNP from 53 per cent of GNP when Dr FitzGerald left office to 38 per cent, a feat unparalleled in the Western World. Fianna Fail has massive credibility in the area of controlling expenditure.
It is quite pointless to compare the level of subsequent expenditure increases during a downturn with expenditure increases in an economic boom. Dr FitzGerald knows all about the role of automatic stabilisers and understands what countercyclical policies are. The early 1990s were the first recession in 20 years in which Ireland escaped, because of the radical corrective action taken by Fianna Fail in the late 1980s: Our criticism of Rainbow policies is that, for the first time since Dr FitzGerald left office, an Irish Government has gone back to following procyclical policies, exaggerating the boom and the risk of inflation, and, in the view of the OECD, running a structural deficit in excess of the Maastricht criteria.
I am not sure whom Dr FitzGerald thinks he is kidding, if he is seriously maintaining that the personal and indirect tax cuts of 1989-92 were of no benefit to people who had to suffer from a crushing tax burden in the mid 1980s under his Government, which preferred to raise taxes than cut expenditure. There are lies, damned lies and statistics, and few have been more adept at demonstrating anything they like with figures than Dr FitzGerald. Over the years, in Government and out, he has always been for a high tax economy on old fashioned social democratic grounds. It is no surprise to find him defending a coalition that basically much prefers to continue with high spending than to make our personal tax system more competitive with the rest of the world. - Yours, etc.
Fianna Fail Spokesperson on Finance.
Leinster House, Dublin 2.