THE DÁIL has begun a two-day debate on the country’s economic and fiscal outlook, in the wake of yesterday’s announcement that the next four budgets would require an overall adjustment of €15bn.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen – who was consistently interrupted during his speech as opposition TDs complained they had not been given a paper copy of his speech – confirmed to the Dáil the €15bn target, saying the target had been reached by the Irish government itself and not the European Commission.

While Ireland had already found savings of €14bn in the last two years, he said, borrowings had increased and the scale of the cuts was necessary in order to avoid a full-blown budgetary crisis.

He added that the government had no desire to back down from the Croke Park agreement outlining pay and conditions in the public sector in return for increased efficiency.

The 2011 Budget, to be announced in December, would be more weighted on spending cuts than on seeking tax increases, he continued.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, however, poured scorn on the €15bn total and remarked that every projection the government had offered so far in the economic downturn, such as the cost of Anglo Irish Bank, the budget deficit and the cost of NAMA.

Six months after the agreement of the Croke Park pay deal, he said, there hadn’t been a single euro of savings implemented in the public sector.

“The fact of the matter is that we now stand [in a country] when depression and anxiety and fear stalk the land,” he said. “The reason is the catastrophic failure of this government to deal with the problems in a clear fashion.”

Labour’s Eamon Gilmore, meanwhile, complained that the briefings given to opposition finance spokespersons last week consisted of merely three pages of tables, outlining the country’s likely economic performance given certain variables.

Gilmore said he feared that such basic hypothetical data – without any concrete breakdowns of such figures – had been used by the government to make its final decision on the €15bn adjustment figure.