16 December 2004 Edition

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Direct rule Budget is a betrayal

Sinn Féin National Chairperson Mitchel McLaughlin, speaking at the launch of the party's response to the draft Six-County Budget and Priorities for 2005-'08 has said that the proposals are a betrayal of the direction, priorities and commitments agreed by local elected representatives in the Assembly and Executive. Speaking in Belfast, McLaughlin said: "It will have a devastating long-term impact on vital services, particularly for the most vulnerable and marginalised people in our society. Across a range of areas, services will be devastated, particularly for our children and young, in our health and education systems and in the priority for tackling poverty.

"It also demonstrates the British Government's determination to force us down the road to privatisation of services and greater dependency on PFI and PPP. It will tie the Assembly into a policy straitjacket and severely restrict the freedom of any future Assembly and Executive.

"The reliance on the Investment Strategy and the Strategic Investment Board is a matter of concern. We are being required to take much of this in good faith. This is not good governance. Essentially, an entire section of the economy and the Programme for Government is being handed over to an unelected, unaccountable non-transparent body.

Sinn Féin spokesperson Equality, Human Rights and Women, South Down MLA Caitríona Ruane has said that the decision to end the Children's Fund was fatally flawed and called for its re-introduction.

"There is also an attempt within the Draft Priorities and Budget to ignore legal equality requirements to skew resources on the basis of objective need and instead to introduce a criteria on the basis of 'particular difficulties in Protestant working class areas'," she pointed out. "Catholic working class areas also have particular difficulties stemming from the structural and institutional discrimination practiced by the state. Across all the deprivation indicators, Catholic/nationalists are worse off. There is a statutory equality duty on government to target resources on the basis of objective need. That is not being done and will result in the skewing of resources even further away from nationalist areas.

Spokesperson on Employment and Learning, West Belfast MLA Michael Ferguson, said that Sinn Féin is also extremely concerned with the insufficient resources allocated to education in the draft budget. "It is imperative that monies allocated improve services rather than just maintaining the current position," he said.

Not sufficient

Health spokesperson, Upper Bann MLA John O'Dowd, said that despite year on year increases, "the budget allocated is not sufficient to meet our health and social care needs".

"The current proposals put a future Executive in the untenable position of imposing health cuts without effective revenue raising powers. Direct Rule Ministers have clearly failed to obtain the resources necessary to support our society and the political delivery of a peace dividend."

Commenting on the economic aspects of the draft proposals, Mitchel McLaughlin said:

"The entire chapter on North/South, East/West and International Relations has disappeared from this document. It is a clear breach of the Good Friday Agreement that there is no all-Ireland economic strategy in this consultation. Partition and the existence of two economies on such a small island have had a detrimental effect on economic growth and wealth creation on the island of Ireland.

"Instead, there is a focus on the north as a separate political and economic entity that can compete on a global scale. This is absurd, as it is clear that the economy of the north of Ireland is not sustainable on its own."

McLaughlin also raised concerns about the issue of water charges. The proposals are to raise this revenue through water rates.

"Sinn Féin remains opposed to the imposition of this new, regressive tax," he said. "We do not believe that people living here should be penalised for British Government negligence in its duty to maintain and improve this system over the last decades. The net outcome of these proposals will be a double tax on water and sewerage services."


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