THE GOVERNMENT had “high expectations” of what the Croke Park agreement could achieve, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said.

“It must facilitate the reduction and restructuring of the public service, with minimal impact on frontline services. It will also be used to deliver significant further savings through reduced overtime and allowances.”

Mr Kenny said next year’s fiscal challenge, and in the period to 2015, required the public service to deliver change in a way it never had before. “These reforms are essential if we are to keep costs to a minimum and avoid additional tax increases which would only serve to act as a disincentive to job creation and investment.”

During the resumed budget debate, Mr Kenny said the economy had returned to growth this year after three years of contraction. “However, given this growing uncertainty in the global market, we have to focus all our efforts on sustaining this fragile recovery.

“The objective of Budget 2012 is to build on these achievements and set out a clear, consistent pathway forward for the Irish economy.”

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin said that for the past nine months, the Government had taken few significant decisions and had coasted on the back of plans already in place or ready to go.

“Its most hyped initiative, the downgraded jobs budget, has damaged investment and cost jobs,” he added. In spite of having a secure majority, which would survive even in the unlikely event that more Labour backbenchers remembered the policies they stood on, the Government had been timid and obsessed with political manoeuvring.

“Never before has a government spent so much time praising itself while actually doing so little.”

Mr Martin claimed that a deeply unfair and damaging budget had emerged from the mountain of detail.

“This budget is the most regressive in years,” he said. “It will cost jobs, it breaks an unprecedented number of promises made only months ago and it may lead to a serious shortfall in Government revenues as soon as early next year.”

Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams said a family of two adults and three children, with a household income of €150,000 a year, would lose €1,052 as a result of the budget. The same size family on social welfare would lose more, €1,078.

“Where is the fairness in that?”

Mr Adams said the jobs crisis would be much worse but for emigration. Since the start of the year, 54,000 mainly young people had left for foreign shores.

“Today there are 444,000 citizens on the Live Register.

“That is more than when Fine Gael and Labour won the election with an entirely different manifesto and it is an indictment of their policies and a reflection of their failure.”

Mr Adams said “the big wages of the political elite” had hardly been touched, with a token sum taken from their super-pensions.

“That is hardly reform,” he added.