The Fine Gael deputy leader, Mr Richard Bruton, yesterday expressed his sympathy with Fianna Fáil backbenchers over the current economic downturn.
He said the TDs, gathered in Killarney for a two-day party think-in, must feel they had been "kept in the dark and knee-deep in manure".
Mr Bruton said the Government's misrepresentation of the true implications of budgetary commitments in the past two years would put Enron executives in the shade.
"In the past two years the increase in spending exceeded that predicted at Budget time by an aggregate of €2.1 billion or 36 per cent in excess of the Budget provision.
"The extra tax revenue fell €4.6 billion short of the estimate, a staggering 83 per cent short of the estimate. The Government surplus as measured by the EU fell €4.1 billion short of meeting the target by 70 per cent." he said.
Mr Bruton said that in its scramble for cutbacks the Government had left the big bureaucracies and the entourage of advisers and spin-doctors untouched.
"Instead, the axe has fallen on the crumbs that come across the table to ordinary people. In health, in education, the weak and those dependent on public funds have been the soft target."
Mr Bruton demanded that the Government call time on "bar-stool economics".
"The hard-learned lessons of the 1980s, of planning expenditure carefully, costing it accurately and spending it prudently have been totally thrown overboard," he said.