€600m hole in budget calculations, group claims

A leading social protection group has claimed the Government’s budget numbers do not add up to scrutiny — and include an alleged €600m gap in calculations.

Social Justice Ireland director Fr Sean Healy made the claim as his group launched a critique of Budget 2014.

The campaigner described the budget as having “no guiding vision, no real sense of direction, and no sustainable solutions to the major challenges Ireland faces”.

Chief among his concerns is a lack of transparency over the full implications of significant savings in the system.

“There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors here [in the budget]. Basically, the numbers don’t add up,” Fr Healy said.

“The Taoiseach said before that ‘Paddy likes to know the score’. I agree.

“The departments need to provide real numbers because we need to know what is contained in the numbers that are not spelt out,” he said.

Among the issues raised are that plans to cut €666m from the health budget next year are unsustainable.

Fr Healy said the figure has been thrown entirely into the Department of Health “instead of spreading out the hit” to various areas of the Government.

He said a footnote on page 14 of the Department of Finance’s ‘Economic and Fiscal Outlook’ document said €600m of the planned savings — a full 20% of the total budget — will come from mystery “additional resources and savings elsewhere”.

However, a Department of Finance spokesperson said the still unknown details of this sum are likely to come from live register and promissory note deal savings, among other undisclosed matters.

Social Justice Ireland raised issues over what it said is a lack of job creation plans in the budget, attacks on the elderly — 88% of whom, he said, would be in poverty without the State pension — and the risk of forced emigration due to cuts against the young.

Fr Healy said the removal of the full medical card for people returning to work after long periods of unemployment “could prevent the uptake” of jobs. He also hit out at claims of wide-spread social welfare fraud.

“Budget 2014 failed to meet the terms of the troika agreement,” Fr Healy said.

“That agreement specified that Government’s adjustments were to be done ‘while protecting core services and the vulnerable’. This budget has failed to honour this condition.”