MAJOR LOCAL authorities should be merged, hundreds of millions of euro worth of allowances for State employees should be cut and €1.5 billion should be taken from the social welfare budget, an expert group has recommended in a report to be published today.
Following a five-hour meeting yesterday, the Cabinet decided to publish the report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes, chaired by UCD economist Colm McCarthy.
Just 22 local authorities would remain under the plan, including the four existing ones in Dublin.
The group recommends the merger of county and city councils in Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway. It also says single councils should serve two counties in a number of cases, including SligoLeitrim and Carlow-Kilkenny, and calls for town councils to be abolished.
The group, informally known as An Bord Snip Nua, was established by the Government in November to identify potential reductions in public expenditure.
Small rural schools with falling numbers should be merged, its report recommends. It also calls for all State lands to be managed by the OPW, and some sold once prices improve.
The Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs should be abolished, it says.
The future of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism should be examined, it says, but, in the meantime, €20 million should be cut from the Sports Council’s budget and the same from the arts budget.
Cuts in social welfare should be severe, but targeted, the report says, proposing a series of reductions in a variety of benefits, including the State pension and unemployment benefits.
Enterprise Ireland should absorb all community enterprise boards, along with other bodies, including Shannon Development, while the offices of the Ombudsman, the Children’s Ombudsman and the Data Protection Commissioner should merge.
Up to a dozen major cutbacks are recommended for each Government department by the group, which was barred from investigating the State’s capital spending and public pay bill.
However, it does propose that allowances, which form a significant part of each State worker’s take-home pay, should be cut. Gardaí, for instance, would lose €50 million worth of allowances. Similar cuts would affect nurses, prison officers and other public sector workers.
The expert group has exceeded the Government’s target recommendation of €3.5 billion worth of cuts, instead proposing a €5.2 billion package involving 17,000 State job losses, including a €300 million reduction in the Health Service Executive’s paybill.
Ireland should abandon its pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of its national budget on overseas aid by 2012 because this can “no longer be afforded”, it recommends. Instead, a new target date of 2015/16 should be set.
Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan last night insisted the public must accept that there are hard choices ahead, adding that €4 billion must be cut from spending or raised in extra tax next year. “There is no doubt that implementing the scale of adjustments required means that we must all take some very difficult decisions,” he said.
The report is split into two volumes: one 80 pages long and the other of 200 pages. Mr Lenihan has sent it to the Oireachtas Finance Committee, chaired by Fianna Fáil TD Michael Ahern.
The committee will, Mr Lenihan said, be able to hear the opinions of all those affected by the independent report’s recommendations.
The report is to be published on the Department of Finance website by early afternoon, and Mr McCarthy will “make himself available for interviews” to make “the report intelligible”, Mr Lenihan said.
The Government emphasised the independence of the report’s authors – though group member Donal McNally, the Department of Finance’s second secretary general, held equal standing to Mr McCarthy.