An Bord Snip Nua - Report calls for proper debate

There should be no sacred cows when it comes to cutting public expenditure, the Taoiseach has warned. Radical action is clearly needed.

“The situation is very bad indeed with the country nearly banjaxed,” according to David Begg, general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. As the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes, commonly known as An Bord Snip Nua, was having its final meeting the Central Statistics Office was publishing figures indicating that the Irish economy declined by an unprecedented 8.5% on an annual basis during the first quarter of this year.

Consumer spending fell by 9.1% over the same period, and GNP declined by 4.5%. The economy had been fuelled by construction, but construction activity dropped by a staggering 31.4% during the first quarter in comparison with the same period last year.

The rate of unemployment rose to 11.9% during June, with the jobless swelling by an extra 11,400 people. They comprised 7,700 men and 3,700 women.

The seasonally adjusted rate indicates that 413,500 people are claiming jobseekers’ benefits. This is the highest figure on record.

In the past year there was an increase of 197,781 people on the life register of unemployed, which was a rise of almost 90% on the previous year. There is no bright side, but there is a glimmer in the fact that unemployment figures are not growing as fast as they were at the beginning of the year.

In January the rise was 33,000, so the June figure of 11,400, – the smallest since last September – compares more favourably.

It is no consolation to the unemployed that the rate of job losses is falling. Although not rising as fast as earlier months unemployment is still rising and nobody doubts that we are in an economic crisis.

The Government remains as vague as ever about how it plans to cut back on public spending. It essentially passed that task to An Bord Snip Nua, which is due to report next week.

The optics of the Government’s handling of this aspect of the economic crisis has been appalling. There has been no sense of urgency. The Government essentially stalled in order to wait for the recommendations of the Expenditure Review Committee and the report of the Committee on Taxation before acting, but once it gets the first of those reports the first thing it is going to do is to send the Dáil on holidays.

Moreover, it is doing so with indecent haste, because it is trying to hurry measures through the Oireachtas in just a week, even though there are questions around how these changes may impact on human rights. Such issues need to be debated properly.

There should also be a proper debate on the review committee’s recommendations. When it comes to the economy, however, it seems that the Government is only in a hurry to delay. Its behaviour exhibits scant regard for the process of representative democracy and a lack of urgency. When the Dáil returns from the holidays, it will probably concentrate on efforts to ratify the Lisbon treaty, and this will lead to a further delay in dealing with the economic crisis.