Bankers and corrupt public officials have done more damage to the economy than the IRA and should be “treated like subversives”, Fine Gael communications and energy spokesman Leo Varadkar has said.
Speaking during a Dáil debate on the economy, Mr Varadkar called on the Government to ensure the people who were responsible for the banking collapse are prosecuted.
“The public are furious that none of these people have been brought to book and they are right and we cannot move on until they are prosecuted,” he said.
The second day of a two-day debate on the economy again saw opposition parties attack the Government over its handling of the current crisis.
Fine Gael’s enterprise spokesman Richard Bruton poured scorn on the current debate over the economy, describing it as “a dialogue of the deaf”.
“The Government sits and talks about the need to confront our problems but offers nothing in the way of solutions. Any solutions that come from the opposition side are characterised [by the Government] as stupid, mealy-mouthed and no good. That’s not constructive dialogue,” he said.
Earlier Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern attacked opposition parties for making empty declarations on to deal with the gap in public finances.
“Talk won’t fill that gap, nor will vague political declarations about locating uncosted waste. Ireland needs concrete proposals,” he said.
Tánaiste and Minister for Education said that the eyes of many will be on Ireland over the next few weeks as it sets a course to rectify the national finances.
Fine Gael’s spokesman on public expenditure Brian Hayes said there was a “lost generation” of people forced to emigrate in the 1980s because corrective economic action was not taken early enough by the Fianna Fáil government of the day.
“This failure led to a 10-yer period of recession and if we have learned anything from that, it is that we have got to make the corrective decisions early and quickly,” he said.
