Seanad debates
Wednesday, 8 October 2003
Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse: Statements (Resumed).
That brings me to another matter, namely that the Department of Education and Science should not have been expected to deal with this out of its existing allocation. That is either a cop-out from the Minister for Finance, and the Taoiseach by implication, by saying: "We have to be generous but you have to be generous within your already constrained budget," or it means saying: "We do not really want to be generous, we want to talk about being generous." Whichever way it happened, it means handing over all this responsibility with the obvious scale of costs involved and then telling the Department of Education and Science: "Tough. It is important but it is not that important. Other things are more important." I could go into a silly populist comparison between issues on which money was spent and issues on which money was not spent or the matters for which extra allocations were made and for which they were not made.
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