30 July 2010
Fighting back against Tory cuts
BY EMMA CLANCY
ORGANISING a united and effective challenge to the British Conservative/Liberal Democrats coalition government’s cuts to public spending and the block grant to the Executive is an urgent priority for Sinn Féin and all progressives in the Six Counties.
The spending cuts announced in the British Emergency Budget on June 22nd will have a disastrous impact on communities and people’s access to basic social needs, including welfare, education and health.
Poots’s blocking of RPA will cost £400m
THE decision by DUP Environment Minister Edwin Poots to reject the Review of Public Administration (RPA) will see more than £400m in savings squandered, Sinn Féin Assembly Group Leader John O’Dowd has said.
“The only way in which the Executive is going to be able to protect frontline services and the most vulnerable in our society who depend most upon them is by cutting back on the bureaucracy and directing the savings into public services,” O’Dowd said.
All-Ireland approach key to recovery
MARTIN McGUINNESS has told the MacGill Summer School in County Donegal that the development of services and legislation on an all-Ireland basis is the way forward to enhance economic development.
Delivering the keynote John Hume Lecture, the deputy First Minister said:
"In the North, we are tied to the British Exchequer and our Executive and Assembly are denied fiscal autonomy. We do not have revenue-raising powers and are dependent on a block grant from London which is based on Barnett – a population statistic-based formula rather than need and which takes no account of the legacy of partition and decades of under-funding by the British Government.
Follow us on Facebook
An Phoblacht on Twitter
Uncomfortable Conversations
An initiative for dialogue
for reconciliation
— — — — — — —
Contributions from key figures in the churches, academia and wider civic society as well as senior republican figures