Tightening the purse strings

“The most savage budget of the economic downturn" says the Irish Independent, assessing the government’s new austerity budget, which aims to save €3.5bn. The savings will come through a mix of higher taxes on property, income and alcohol, plus cuts in benefits, including those for parents, pensioners and the unemployed.Ireland must make savings in order to continue to receive EU and IMF bailouts. Seizing on a comment by Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Eamon Gilmore, who pledged the budget would be fair and “those who had the most would pay the most”, the daily’s opinion writer, Johnny Fallon, brands the fairness test a failure, saying –

There were a number of smash-and-grab elements that are hard to justify when one talks of a Budget being fair. Budget 2013 will bring much hardship and it will do so because the government has failed to do its job before this. The reality is that at least some of the measures we are taking make no sense at all and the EU is concerning itself with a longer game, and effects on other countries, with little care for what happens on the ground in Ireland in the meantime. Ireland can wait. After a savage Budget that is intent on sacrificing ordinary families on the altar of a socio-economic model that no one is even sure they like or want, it is time to say enough.

In The Irish Times, Stephen Collins, adds that the budget has walked a careful line and manages to keep both the Labour Party and Fine Gael sides of the coalition happy, but he notes the new property tax is likely to trigger future problems, writing –

It is still going to be an enormous imposition, and paying it will be widely resented by an already hard-pressed electorate.