Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is an old saying - a true one - that goes: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave/When first we practise to deceive!" This Fine Gael-Labour coalition has spun its way through budget 2014 but all its spinning cannot deceive the Irish people, who know the reality of austerity. Make no mistake: this was an austerity budget.

Behind the waffle and the spin that we got from the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan Howlin, yesterday and from the Taoiseach and Tánaiste this morning are the hard facts, the details of the myriad of cuts imposed in budget 2014. In their speeches, they invoked William Butler Yeats and Mother Ireland and her stolen purse; they even invoked the starving victims of the Great Hunger. However, they set out very few of the real details of the budget, the full details that expose the fraudulent nature of this coalition’s public relations spin. Nowhere is this cynical spin exposed more starkly than in the area of health.

The public relations headline is, of course, the extension of free GP care to children of five and under. However, the reality is that spending on medical cards is being cut and tens of thousands of people who currently have medical cards or would have been entitled to them up to now are set to lose them. Some €37 million is to be spent on the under-fives GP card but €149 million is to be taken out of the medical card budget. That will mean that more people currently in need will lose their medical cards. We in Sinn Féin said the extension of free GP care to children under five would be a welcome start to universal access for all, which I acknowledge, but not at the expense of taking medical cards from other sections of the population who need them. This is not universality; quite simply, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul. In Sinn Féin’s comprehensive, fair and costed alternative budget, we provided for the extension of free GP care to all children under five without depriving anyone else of his or her medical card entitlement. This is not universal health care but a shameless attempt at the universal hoodwinking of the public. It is the Labour Party trying to appear to be the giving left hand while attempting to conceal the robbing right hand of Fine Gael. They behave like thieves. Clearly, through this budget and a third austerity budget, they are as thick as thieves.

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