Kenny brands state talks with unions a ‘charade’

TALKS between the Government and unions ahead of next week’s budget were described as a “charade” by Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny as he launched his party’s alternative to the Government’s budget.

Mr Kenny said he would not have engaged in such discussions if he were Taoiseach.

His party’s alternative to the Government’s budget proposes cutting the overall public sector pay bill by 3.2% as well as a 10,000 reduction in public sector staff numbers.

Pay cuts would work on a phased basis, with public sector workers earning between €40,000 and €45,000 facing cuts of just under 1% with those earning over €150,000 seeing their salaries reduced by between 5.4% and 7%.

Under the proposals, no public sector worker would earn more than the Taoiseach.

Launching the plans yesterday, before talks between the unions and Government officials broke down, Mr Kenny said his party would have done things differently: “I wouldn’t get into the charade that’s going on this week, I state that as a general principle,” he said.

“What’s happening here five days before the most crucial budget of this generation is just an indication of gross incompetence and confusion and chaos within Government circles,” Mr Kenny added.

While he respected the “absolute right of trade unions to be able to put their case forward” it was “a matter of Government and Cabinet of the day to make the ultimate decisions”.

Fine Gael’s pre-budget submission also proposes:

- Cuts of 3% in social welfare payments but this would exclude reductions in child benefit, the old age pension or benefits paid to carers or the disabled.

- Cuts of €779m in the annual health bill which runs at €16bn.

- Overall spending cuts of €2.33bn in Government departments. But there are no details of how this would be broken down.

- Abolition of the Seanad and a cut of the number of junior ministers from 15 to 12.

- Taking €500m from the capital budget to put towards a jobs stimulus plan which would put 50,000 back to work next year.

- Savings of €593m through what it calls “taxes on the better off” including €33m in restrictions on the artists’ tax exemption and €120m from the abolition of the PRSI ceiling.

Finance spokesman Richard Bruton, denied that taxing the rich would have a negative impact on job creation. “We are making the minimum changes to personal taxes,” he said.

“We are looking for a net contribution of just one tenth of the overall adjustment from tax. We are not relying on tax as the driver of this,” said Mr Bruton.

The 10,000 job cuts in the public sector would come from closing or merging 150 state agencies or so-called quangos.

“There is huge scope for consolidating those and delivering them more cost effectively with less head count,” said Mr Bruton.

“A lot of departments replicate the same form – exercises, inspection exercises, payout exercises,” he said.