Joan Burton - same accountancy degree as Bertie?

Labour’s Finance spokesman Joan Burton regularly reminds us that she is a qualified accountant.
I’m beginning to wonder if she graduated from the same college as Bertie Ahern.

For starters, Labour’s only detailed cost-cutting proposal for bridging the huge deficit in the public finances is to cap public sector pay @ €200k per annum.

Does even 1% of the public sector workforce earn over €200k? What miniscule contribution to cutting the deficit will such a token measure make?

Then there's NAMA.
Today in the Dail, Joan Burton is pushing all the populist buttons by implying that “nurses, firemen and doctors” are looking at pay cuts in order to fund NAMA.
Burton doesn’t seem to understand that the current budget deficit is not caused by NAMA and will not be changed by NAMA.

Any NAMA-related impact on the pay of public sector (and other workers) will only become a factor if NAMA fails to deliver in 7-10 years time.

So either Burton doesn’t understand the nature of the current budget deficit or else she’s playing populist politics by misleading the public.

In either case, that makes her very questionable ministerial material. Labour/Burton need to stop waffling, drop the NAMA populist bullshit and start putting forward some realistic solutions to resolve the budget deficit.