Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

Yesterday was the Minister for Finance's fourth budget in two years. It is my sincere hope that it will be the Taoiseach's party's last budget for many years to come for the party opposite has shown that it is incapable of learning from its mistakes. This budget, like the Minister's previous efforts, is devoid of hope, ideas and imagination. It is a budget devised by bean counters to meet the fiscal targets set by outsiders. It is the product of a Minister who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The Irish people do not need to be told just how bad things are. They know it only too well from their daily lives. Because they know times are tough, they never expected that this budget would be easy but the very least they expected was that the budget would be fair. Instead, they got a series of proposals from the Minister that widened the gap between those at the top and those at the bottom. The statistic I quoted earlier makes it clear. Before this budget the Taoiseach's salary was 13 times the minimum wage and after this budget his salary is 14 times the minimum wage. How can he possibly justify such unfairness in a situation like this? That is not the worst of it.

Buried in the numbers is a savage reduction of €8 per week in the income of carers, of widows, of the blind and of those with a disability. We all remember the posters from Fianna Fáil that read health cuts hut the old, the sick and the handicapped. The €8 reduction hurts the quality of the lives of the carers, those with a disability, the blind and the widows. Let us be clear about this: there is absolutely no economic, moral or social case for cutting the income of vulnerable groups such as these, especially when there is a clear alternative. The exclusion of all these would have cost the State €96 million. This would have been paid for by the proposal from my party to completely overhaul the welfare system and establish a single payment and entitlement service. The Taoiseach may well laugh, smirk and grin at it, but he is responsible for deliberately driving a wedge-----

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