Certainly, it was a case of all their Christmases coming at once for the five per cent of our population who own 40% of our national wealth. The budget savagely assaulted working people and those who have been paying PRSI (social insurance) all their lives who have lost their jobs due to the Government’s mismanagement of the economy while leaving the rich unscathed”
The draconian budget will severely hit public service workers who are faced with another pay cut on top of the average 7% cut imposed last March. The lowest paid people earning less than €30,000 a year will suffer another 5% cut which according to SIPTU will represent a higher percentage of their take home pay than that applying to the top earners.
http://www.siptu.ie/PressRoom/NewsReleases/Headline/Name,11338,en.html
The Irish establishment media is whipping up public hostility to trade unions in attempts to scapegoat working people for the calamitous economic failure of the bankers and their political hirelings. For example Alan Rudock writing in today’s Sunday Independent: “a decisive shift has taken place over the past two weeks, a shift that strengthens Irish democracy by removing trade union officials from government policy-making. It is too early to say that the trade unions have been broken -- the next three months will be the test of that -- but they are no longer wagging the government dog. The trade union leadership, like the political leadership, has also been cruelly exposed by the new economic reality. Widely praised for their astuteness and cunning during the boom years, they have been revealed to be weak and uncertain when faced with genuine negotiations, rather than the choreographed nonsense so beloved of the Bertie Ahern years. They could have been part of Ireland's new beginning, but now they have chosen to remain in the past, and that is where Cowen and Lenihan should leave them”.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/now-is-our-era-of-truth-and-consequences-1973086.html
Predictably the Economist magazine heralded the slash and burn budget as showing ‘the rest of Europe what austerity really means”.
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15073973
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) has condemned the Irish Government’s economic package as a “budget of no hope” and said that “the harsh measures contained in Budget 2010 would do untold damage to the social fabric of the country”.
http://www.ictu.ie/
In response to these unprecedented attacks, the Irish unions are working out a considered strategy. SIPTU says: “the entire trade union movement must respond to this attack in a sustained and co-ordinated way. We must avoid a knee jerk reaction and high profile gimmicks which will burn out after a few days. We will be preparing initiatives which can be implemented in every location. These will entail political, civil and industrial initiatives in the community and in the workplace and they must be conducted relentlessly over the next twelve months commencing shortly after the budget measures begin to take effect”.