Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

Leaving that behind and moving to the budgetary issue, as late as last week there was a suggestion from Deputy Gilmore that he felt it was possible to meet the requirements of the situation while protecting major areas of expenditure in all and every circumstance. I am sure he sincerely believed this. All of us are having to contemplate areas of policy change which we would not wish to do in normal times. When times were better I recall that in my budgets in the region of €4.4 billion extra was paid in welfare, and rightly so. It was well in excess of inflation, the consumer price index, CPI, or anything else. That is not something that could be confirmed in every year in which the Labour Party was in office. That is beside the point.

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