Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Ted Kennedy spent his entire life trying to get a decent health service for the people he represented. The biggest cut in any of area in the budget is to health services. Ted Kennedy was a man who fought for the poor. He said the poor may be out of political fashion but they are not without human needs. He would never have supported measures that take money from the blind, carers, widows and people who have lost their jobs.

Ted Kennedy was a champion of public servants. He always spoke with pride and with respect of firefighters, police officers, teachers and local authority workers. I wonder what he would have thought of the campaign that was successfully conducted by Fianna Fáil for the past 12 months to denigrate abuse, belittle and demean the people who work in our schools and hospitals. I was saddened over the weekend when a hospital worker told me how she had to meet an abusive tirade from a drunken lout on a night out when she was described as a parasite. The same drunken lout now probably has something to cheer about from this budget given the reduction in the price of alcohol. All of that was done to harden public opinion against public servants to justify the cuts in pay that were announced yesterday, including the savage cuts in the pay of the lowest paid workers in the public service. The budget owes more to the thinking of Ronald Reagan than it does to the thinking of Ted Kennedy.

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