Capital spending plan - Cabinet is right to prioritise

GIVEN the dire state of the economy, it would be sheer madness had the Government not wielded the axe on a raft of projects in its infrastructure and capital investment programme for the next five years.

Among key ventures which have been deferred, Dublin’s Metro North, the DART underground and Thornton Hall prison were relics of the long extinct Celtic Tiger, an era when, despite repeated warnings, the Fianna Fáil-Green administration splurged as if the good times would never end.

For many years to come, the Irish people will know to their cost how wrong they were.