McCreevy refuses to rule out tax rise to pay for pay deal

FINANCE Minister Charlie McCreevy yesterday refused to rule out tax rises to pay for the new national pay deal. The country’s 260,000 public sector workers are due a pay rise of 9%, or a total of 1bn, under the benchmarking process.

But Mr McCreevy told the Dáil yesterday that the question of how to pay for these increases in the new social partnership deal depended on resources available to the Government.

He said that making guesses was not very wise, and that any suggestion that taxes would automatically rise was very speculative at this stage.