Government ‘can no longer blame’ international forces

THE Government can no longer blame international factors for the economic downturn, the opposition claimed last night.

Both Fine Gael and Labour said the fuelling of the property market by successive Fianna Fáil-lead coalitions was responsible for the country officially entering recession.

They were responding to figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) yesterday showing the country has had two successive quarters of negative economic growth, which is the official definition of recession.

Labour’s finance spokeswoman Joan Burton blamed “Cowenomics” and said the country has “just got slumpier and slumpier”.

She said the CSO figures “bear out what we know in terms of the 46,000 people who’ve lost their jobs since Mr Cowen became Taoiseach and the 70,000 or more who have lost their jobs since the last budget”.

“It means that we enter into the budget in even more difficult circumstances. It shows the folly where we were over-reliant on the construction sector,” she said.

Fine Gael finance spokesman Richard Bruton said the figures show the Government was “entirely wrong” in its assertion that international credit crunch caused the downturn.

“The impact on our economy is four times greater than for example in the UK. The impact on unemployment in Ireland is 12 times greater than in the UK.

“It is not a factor that we are being effected in the same way as others,” said the FG finance spokesman.

Mr Bruton said the Government’s “flirtation with the property boom and the bubble in the property sector has seriously damaged the capacity of the economy to cope with more difficult times”.