Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The most effective way of reducing the cost of social welfare expenditure is to get people back to work. The difficulty that the budget labours under is that when the then Government made the forecasts this time last year and signed off on the Memorandum of Understanding, it estimated a higher growth rate but more importantly from the point of view of the Department, that only 405000 people would be unemployed, whereas unemployment figures are higher and are running at 45,000 ahead of what was estimated. To try to reduce expenditure we have to focus on getting people back to work, something I have emphasised.

The IMF, because of its experience in other countries, is very conscious of the role played by social expenditure and social welfare expenditure in demand in domestic economies. Therefore, it has emphasised its understanding of that. The ECB, as part of the troika, is very interested in seeing moneys it has set aside for Ireland being secured as quickly as possible.

See this speech in context