DÁIL REACTION - LABOUR:IRISH AND foreign banks are the winners in the Budget while the cuts borne by people with children this year and last "are the biggest cuts of all," according to Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton.
She said Irish and foreign banks were “hoovering up our money not just to bail out our own Irish banks but to bail out the bond-holders who so foolishly lent to our out-of-control bankers and developers”.
She added that “some responsibility must be borne by those foreign banks who lent so recklessly and greedily. The ECB, from their lofty perches should have been more familiar with bubbles.”
Hitting out at the EU-IMF deal Ms Burton said “two years of savage deflation and your deal with the IMF is four more years”.
Ms Burton said developers and property tycoons continued to “as the Minister for Finance put it, ‘party on’ ”. She said Mr Lenihan made it sound as if the cuts and the adjustments were like “a walk in the park sometime after your Christmas dinner, joining the gym or going down to Unislim. It’s a way of working off the excess that you built up over the boom.”
But “the cuts being borne by people with children . . . taken this year and last year are the biggest of all”.
A family with three children would lose €40 a month in child benefit. “And it’s a comment on how few women there are in this House and how little political power they exercise compared to bankers.”
Ms Burton said that of cuts of €2,192 million it was “very noticeable that health and children” take a hit of €1.6 billion.
She added that “at the end of this set of Fianna Fáil budgets and as a direct result of this Government’s policies the gap between rich and poor will have widened. Ireland will be a more divided society than ever”.
The Labour party proposed “that the heavy lifting would be done by removing the tax breaks as a down payment by very wealthy people against a more general tax reform in Irish society”.
As she spoke about the tax reliefs, Taoiseach Brian Cowen repeatedly interrupted and said Labour in Government had far more tax reliefs in place. Former minister for finance Ruairí Quinn said “at least ours worked” but Mr Cowen said Mr Quinn “brought in seaside tax relief where there wasn’t even a seaside”.
