TOUGH DECISIONS:GOVERNMENT MINISTERS have warned that tough decisions have been made in the run-up to today's budget.
Minister for Social Affairs Mary Hanafin said people of all income levels will have to play their part in revitalising the economy - but she insisted that the most vulnerable would be protected.
"Every person will have to make a contribution to bringing balance and stability back to the economy and to ensure not only that we protect the vulnerable, but that we can ensure we get back to the days where people in Ireland know that they can have an optimistic future - and I believe we can do that," Ms Hanafin said.
She declined to go into any detail on spending plans in her own department, except to say that increases in the number of people signing on for unemployment benefit will put extra cost pressures on her department.
"Without doing anything the budget for the department next year would be €19 billion. Anyone would accept that that is a huge amount of money, but there will be great demands on it because of the numbers who unfortunately are losing their jobs, and we know that the live register will increase," she said.
"Every €1 increase that we give on any of the social welfare payments costs €64 million, so these are the challenges we have. It means we have had difficult decisions to make, including my department," said Ms Hanafin.
Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise Mary Coughlan said the budget would be "difficult" but there also would be a focus on the reskilling of the unemployed and supporting the economy.
"There's an expectation that it's going to be quite a difficult budget and it is. We've spent a considerable period of time looking at our finances and the White Paper has indicated a €12 billion shortfall," Ms Coughlan said.
"If you balance that on the basis that we've increased our spending capacity in services and infrastructure over the last number of years, we are looking towards a balanced budget where we do have to reduce our expenditure, where we have to look at value for money and I think the theme is to do more for less and that's the ethos we're working within," she said.
". . . We don't have the money to do certain things. We're going to have to park some things, do more for less amount of money that's available and I think the majority of people in Ireland are doing the same things themselves," she said.
Ms Coughlan refused to specify what groups would be hardest hit but stressed that the Government had "tried to be as balanced as humanly possible".
"We're coming off a different base to what we went through in the 1980s and really I think there's a greater reality on the basis of what happened two weeks ago in the banking sector, that people now realise that it's not just an Irish issue, but an international issue and one which all of us as nations are going to have to work towards," she said.