AS HE PREPARES to deliver his fourth Budget as Minister for Finance in front of a live television audience we wonder if Michael Noonan will remember the first time the Budget was televised back in 1991?
“With one or two exceptions it was a Budget which measured up to all the speculation of the past weeks,” says RTÉ reporter Donal Kelly in this report - a sentence that could probably apply to most budgets down the years including this year’s.
Minister for Finance Albert Reynolds, who sadly passed earlier this year, told the Dáil and the country that the government needed to plan for an uncertain international background, emphasising the need for “prudence” in our domestic affairs.
Indeed.
In response, Fine Gael’s finance spokesperson Noonan, who has always had a way with words, dismissed the measures announced as a “soft-shoe shuffle” and was generally critical of the government.
There was a response too from the Labour spokesperson on finance, Ruairí Quinn, who was later to occupy the same position as Reynolds and until recently was the Minister for Education.
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