Jim Higgins (Fine Gael)

I move amendment No. 1:

After "Budgetary Statement" to add the following:

"and deplores the mismanagement of the public finances by the Minister for Finance which will lead to unprecedented cutbacks across every Government Department."

This is not a good budget. I listened to the Minister for Finance recite his old mantra this afternoon, when he said that international factors can be blamed for our economic difficulties. Ireland has always been subject to outside economic influences, but they are minimal at present. The reason we have had an announcement of the nature of today's Budget Statement is the massive and reckless splurge of this Government and its predecessor. The budgetary policies of the two years before the general election have caused the difficulties we discussed in this House when the Book of Estimates came before it two weeks ago.

Savage cuts in many areas were mentioned by many Senators in the course of the debate on the Estimates. Despite the manifesto promises of the Government parties in relation to the schools building programme, it has been cut by 4%. The Government vowed to create jobs, but community employment schemes have been cut by 5,000 places. There was a promise to fast-track the Luas project, but it has been delayed by a further year and the metro is nothing but a pipe dream.

Despite the crisis in the tourism sector, Bord Fáilte's grant has been cut by 20% and the budget of the embryonic Tourism Ireland, a North-South joint initiative, was cut by 3%. Although the scourge of crime was demonstrated by the graphic illustration of street violence in last Thursday's "Prime Time", the promised 2,000 additional gardaí will not be recruited. The first-time buyer's grant has been abolished in spite of the enhancement programmes designed to enable people to own a house for the first time and to get their feet on the property ladder. There was a categorical promise to allocate 200,000 additional medical cards, but the plan has been consigned to the scrapheap.