The President of the Workers Party Michael Finnegan has said that recommendations in today’s report of the body dubbed “An Bord Snip Nua” amount to nothing less than a hysterical attack on the working class and a further attempt to make workers and their families pay for a crime committed by the banking institutions in which ordinary workers had no hand, act or part.

Mr. Finnegan said that the terms of reference given to the committee, headed up by a right-wing economist Dr. Colm McCarthy, in which increased taxes on multinationals and billionaires were totally ruled out, was a charter to attack the working class and that workers and their families should resist it categorically. 

Responding to the individual cut proposals including cuts in social welfare payments and the plan to dispense with thousands of front line health care and education workers, Mr. Finnegan said that the report and its authors were an abomination.

The Workers’ Party called on the trade union movement and the left in general to work in unison to fight the proposals and said it was clear that the combined forces of capital were making sure that the bankers, speculators and multinationals would not pay for the mess which they and they alone had created through criminal enterprise.

“The government has in effect launched a class war against workers and their families.  There can be only one response to such a declaration and that is an utter rejection of the report and a determination to ensure that it cannot be implemented”.

“Parents, school goers, hospital patients, the elderly and the young have all come under vicious attack in this report and therefore we must all unite to ensure that this report is buried along with the discredited George Bush style politics which gave birth to it”.

It is an utter lie to say that there are no alternatives to these cuts.  Billions of Euro have been purloined from the taxpayers of this country by speculators, multinationals and the plain corrupt.  Our natural gas deposits have been given away for a song when they could have ensured that we could expand public services instead of destroying them. This report will decimate an already woefully inadequate health service and cripple our schools.  More people will fall through the cracks in society and we will see more early deaths of our young people and the report totally shreds any possible response to the Ryan Report which highlighted the lack of services such as out of hours psychiatric services, proper centres for vulnerable young people and remedial services.     In short, and without one scintilla of exaggeration, this report will be the death knell, not only of vital public services, but of thousands of people.

Issued 16th July 2009