The sick and vulnerable will bear the brunt of the Government’s €1.5 billion cuts package, opposition leaders warned yesterday.
The charge came as Taoiseach Brian Cowen revealed a bigger squeeze on spending may yet be needed, but said he would try to “minimise” the impact on frontline services.

Fine Gael’s Enda Kenny accused Mr Cowen of conducting a “sacrilegious” raid on funding set aside to aid elderly people in care homes by delaying the Fair Deal scheme.

He claimed a third of the €440 million cuts planned for this year would come from the health budget.

“What he has done is politically sacrilegious and he is condemned for that. “He has taken one in three of the €440m in cutbacks from the health area, which he proclaimed had not been subject to any cuts,” Mr Kenny said of the Taoiseach.

He condemned the delaying of Fair Deal, which he said families of elderly people in care homes were desperately in need of aid from: “The promises made to help families with the high cost of nursing home care have been abandoned.”

The Taoiseach rejected the charge regarding Fair Deal, insisting the initiative was unlikely to have come into practice this financial year due to problems with how to administer it.

“The Fair Deal scheme can only come into place when there is a proper legal footing for it. Dealing with people who have diminished mental capacity is a legally challenging area,” said Mr Cowen.

The Taoiseach said it was his intention to “minimise” the impact of the cuts on frontline services and he had never stated that medical care would be exempt from the “savings” drive.

Mr Kenny replied that it was not good enough for the Taoiseach to cite the fact the scheme had been beset by problems as a reason for its shelving.

“These people may have to sell the family home to pay for that care. It does not matter to them that the Government has not been able to draft legislation,” the FG leader said.

Delaying the Fair Deal scheme will save €85m, and another €38m will be cut from initiatives on cancer and disability care.

Labour leader Eamon Gilmore also attacked the Taoiseach for not being upfront about the scale of any cutbacks to come.

He said a drive to cut the Government payroll by 3% would only produce €250m of the €1.5 billion package.

The Labour leader said the Government had offered nothing to the unemployed in its emergency spending review, despite more than 25,000 people having lost their jobs since Mr Cowen became Taoiseach in early May.

“That is nearly 600 for every working day he has been Taoiseach,” Mr Gilmore said in Leaders’ Questions in the Dáil.

Mr Gilmore said it was clear that capital projects, as well as current spending, would be hit by the cuts as he accused Mr Cowen of deliberately trying to confuse the public about the impact of the drive to cut spending on the health and education budgets.