Former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald has said he expects Fine Gael to back the forthcoming budget.
Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan insisted yesterday they were confident the budget, due to be delivered on December 7th, would be passed.
Dr FitzGerald said he did not believe it was in his former’s party interest for the budget to fail.
"It doesn't suit the Opposition to defeat the budget although they may talk about it. Fine Gael I think show signs of wanting to let it go through," he told RTÉ Radio. "If it was defeated, it wouldn't get them anywhere and then they would have to bring in the measures."
Dr FitzGerald also described the politics of the last few weeks as a “shambles”, saying he cannot understand why people in Fianna Fáil would want to get rid of Mr Cowen.
“Have they reason to believe a successor would be elected by the Dáil?” he asked. “I’d quite see how they’d prefer to go into an election perhaps without Cowen but I can’t understand how they expect to achieve that.
“The effect of getting rid of Cowen would be almost certainly that the successor would not be elected and the Dáil would then proceed to elect somebody else. All probability says they would elect the leader of Fine Gael…why would Fianna Fáil want to do that?
“They seem to be just panicked and lost all understanding of our constitution and how it works,” he added.
The former taoiseach conceded that while the current crisis is “all our own fault” largely due to policy made throughout the decade it has been aggravated by “bad luck”.
He said German chancellor Angela Merkel’s comments regarding bond holders and the European Central Bank’s decision to reduce the amount of assistance to Ireland had not helped.
However, Dr FitzGerald added that he felt the country will recover. “I think we will come quite well out of it at the end of it all but it will cost a lot and in the meantime it will be pretty painful.”