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Irish junior coalition party votes to stay in power
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 10 - 10 - 2009


Ireland's Green Party voted on
Saturday in favour of staying in power, removing the risk of a
snap election that would have scuppered a "bad bank" plan to
revive the financial system and held up urgent fiscal surgery, Reuters reported.
Members of the party voted 84 percent to 16 percent in
favour of a new programme that will see them continue to support
Prime Minister Brian Cowen's government as it seeks to revive
the worst-performing economy in western Europe.
"This programme for government is about ... getting this
country back up on its feet again," Green Party Leader John
Gormley told delegates, warning they would still have to stomach
tough spending cuts as December's budget loomed.
"Very, very hard decisions have to be made," Gormley said.
"We are willing to make those decisions."
Members dismissed by 69-31 percent a motion calling for the
party to reject Cowen's plan to create a National Asset
Management Agency (NAMA) to remove risky commercial property
loans with a nominal value of 77 billion euros ($113 billion)
off the books of its banks.
The thumbs up from the Greens is a major relief for
investors in Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks, who are
relying on NAMA to draw a line under doubts about the lenders'
future following the credit crunch and a devastating local
property crash.
The Greens, who wrung concessions including a windfall tax
on property speculation from Cowen on the NAMA legislation, will
now support the law in parliament and it could be passed next
month.
The Green vote is a reprieve for Cowen's Fianna Fail party,
which would almost certainly have been banished to the
opposition benches following a general election and for Cowen
himself, who would have faced calls to resign as party leader if
the Green votes had gone the other way.
Only last week he scored a major victory in getting the
European Union's reform treaty ratified in a referendum but
Cowen faces his toughest challenge over the new couple of months
in persuading backbenchers to agree to back his fiscal reforms.
The 49-year-old has promised Brussels he will get the
country's deficit, proportionately the worst in the euro zone,
under control by 2013 and he needs to start cutting politically
sensitive areas of spending to make that happen.
Green Party officials warned earlier this year that the
coalition could still collapse towards December as Cowen tries
to push through 4 billion euros of savings in the 2010 budget.
But Gormley said he was fully committed to the fiscal cuts.
"You can't argue against the mathematics of it," Gormley
told reporters after the vote. "We are borrowing 400 million
(euros) a week, there is no getting away from it."


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