Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I thank the Labour Party and Deputy Shortall for sharing time with me. Yesterday's statement by the Taoiseach has caused irreparable damage to the public's confidence in the Government and has cemented the perception that, unfortunately, the Taoiseach is incapable of recognising the real issues and is simply fixated on targeting our public workers and our front line services. The Taoiseach's only strategy is to attack nurses, gardaí and people breaking their backs to serve the public.

The public and all on this side of the House were waiting for the Taoiseach to finally deliver a plan to deal with the real problems of our deteriorating economy. It is through rescuing the economy that we can shore up our finance deficit. The unemployment rate is now at 9.2%, and if we keep on losing jobs at a rate of 9,000 a week, the €2 billion savings will evaporate, through the increased burden on our social welfare system.

This morning, the Taoiseach stated this was an "old fashioned approach" to focus on job creation. If this is the case, why is it that almost every other country in the western world is engaged in kickstarting the economy and not kicking public sector workers? We will continue to call for a coherent plan which focuses on job creation, job retention and finding the money to address the increasing national debt through getting the wealthy to pay their fair share.

What is most annoying about the Government's cutback plan is despite all the talk of sharing the burden once again our low and medium paid workers will get it in the neck. It is nurses who will lose €2,250 from their salaries and it is gardaí who will have thousands of euro taken from their incomes. Effectively the actions of the Government mean that hard-working people will have to take a pay cut of up to €3,000 before paying the income levy and health charges. What makes this even more difficult to accept is that the Brendan Drumms of this world, who earn almost €500,000 of taxpayers' money between their salaries and bonuses, continue to get off scot free and are being allowed to continue wreck the public service with the Government's privatisation plans.

Today in the Dáil, the Taoiseach stated he will seek a 25% pay cut for banking executives. This is not nearly enough given that we are about to hand them €8 billion of taxpayers' money to bail them out for their reckless lending. We still do not know when the beloved directors of Anglo Irish Bank will finally pay back the €179 million worth of loans they now owe to the taxpayer. President Obama's idea of placing a ceiling of approximately $500,000 on bank executives comes close to the mark. A 25% cut will still leave our so-called world class banking directors with salaries worth millions of euro each and nothing has been done about the earnings of a vast number of public body CEOs, including the CEO of the ESB who continues to earn in excess of €500,000.

It is clear the Government's pension levy plan discriminates against the lower paid as the higher one goes up the scale the smaller the increases become. This does not include the fact that the high earners in the public sector will be able to claim most of this money back in tax relief on their pensions. In our pre-budget submission we made the point that the Government should have a standard rate relief which would have yielded almost €1 billion for the Exchequer. It has continued to ignore this and instead focused solely on cutbacks.

There are a number of sources of savings, particularly ending subsidies to private companies operating in the public services and numerous other areas. It is job creation that increases revenue and it is only when the Government finally sees the importance of a strategy that we will create the conditions necessary for recovery. The Government's approach must change. We need to see the front-loading of critical infrastructure labour intensive projects. We need greater assistance for business start-ups. We need to grow the indigenous export market, develop and support a truly innovative culture and rebuild the Irish economy. The Taoiseach will have to re-enagage with this House and finally start listening to this side of the House.

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