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Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 19 February 2019

Tuesday, 19 February 2019

Ceisteanna (21, 22, 23, 24)

Brendan Howlin

Ceist:

21. Deputy Brendan Howlin asked the Taoiseach if he will report on the work of the economic division of his Department. [5374/19]

Amharc ar fhreagra

Mary Lou McDonald

Ceist:

22. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked the Taoiseach if he will report on the work of the economic division of his Department. [6556/19]

Amharc ar fhreagra

Richard Boyd Barrett

Ceist:

23. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Taoiseach if he will report on the economic division of his Department. [7979/19]

Amharc ar fhreagra

Brendan Howlin

Ceist:

24. Deputy Brendan Howlin asked the Taoiseach when Cabinet committee A on the economy last met; and when it is expected to next meet. [8224/19]

Amharc ar fhreagra

Freagraí ó Béal (27 píosaí cainte)

I propose to take Questions Nos. 21 to 24, inclusive, together.

The economic division in my Department assists me and the Government in developing and implementing policy to deliver sustainable and regionally balanced economic growth and quality jobs, as well as to promote effective planning and delivery of infrastructural developments, including housing.

The Cabinet committees and associated senior officials groups backed by the division help to implement policies in these areas. Cabinet committee A deals with issues relating to the economy and the labour market, competitiveness, productivity, rural development, the digital economy and pensions. It last met on 12 November and the next meeting has not yet been scheduled. Cabinet committee D works to ensure a co-ordinated approach to the delivery and ongoing development of policy across the areas of infrastructure investment, housing and climate action. It provides political oversight on Project Ireland 2040. It last met on 31 January.

The economic division also leads Ireland's participation in the annual European semester process. It prepares the annual national risk assessment, which provides an opportunity to identify and consider potential economic risks and challenges on a structured basis. The 2018 report was published in July. The 2019 national risk assessment process will commence shortly. The division is also responsible for liaison with the Central Statistics Office.

The division is leading the preparation of the Future Jobs initiative in partnership with the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation. Future Jobs is the Government's new economic initiative to ensure we are well placed to meet future challenges facing the Irish economy. Future Jobs will drive our development as a resilient, innovative and globally connected economy capable of coping with technological and other transformational changes ahead. It is aimed at enhancing productivity, labour market participation, innovation, skills and talent and the low-carbon economy. My note states that it will be launched in the next two weeks but it will not, although I hope it might go to Cabinet in the next two weeks.

A unit with the economic division works with the Minister of State with responsibility for data protection to help ensure a whole-of-Government approach to data protection and broader digital issues. In this regard the unit provides the secretariat to the interdepartmental committee on data issues and to the Government data forum. The division is currently leading the development of a new overarching national digital strategy in collaboration with other relevant Departments to enable us to maximise the societal and economic benefits from digitalisation. That will be published in the first half of this year.

The division provides me with briefing and speech material on economic and related policy issues. Given its role, the division works closely with colleagues in the Departments of Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform, as well as other Departments that have lead responsibility for specific policy areas.

The division contributes to work across my Department and the wider Civil Service in response to the challenge posed by Brexit. In particular, the division is currently working with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and other Departments on no-deal contingency planning. This is a priority task as long as there is a risk of a no-deal outcome.

A TASC report was issued today, which in a sense is referring to developments in the economy like digitalisation. This is increasingly producing people who are earning significant amounts of money, as well as significant numbers of workers who are on low pay. Some of them are on very low pay and they have few guarantees in their work or work status.

Does the Taoiseach believe we should move from having a minimum wage to having a living wage as part of the economic policy of this country?

Would Fine Gael support a move from a living wage, which has now become fairly well-established? In the context of how rents and costs have moved for people on low incomes, it is patently not sufficient to allow people to afford the astronomical rents that are now a feature of life not just in Dublin but increasingly throughout Ireland. Even where two people in a couple are working, it is extremely limiting in terms of being able to aspire to purchasing a house. This is a major change in society.

The Taoiseach has often spoken glowingly about digitalisation and its future but has he considered at any point what is going to happen to the people in lower-income employments who have very little way of improving their wages and salaries unless the Government moves? The Government has given 20 cent increases in the minimum wage in recent years, which, in the context of things like rent, goes nowhere towards meeting the needs of workers. Today's TASC report shows that this is now making Ireland, notwithstanding a very good social welfare system that compensates for much, much less equal than it ought to be.

I too raise the TASC report published this morning. It shows a disproportionate share of national income accrues to richer groups in society and consequently a lower share to the less well-off section of society. The report finds that the bottom 40% of the State's population receives just 22% of the national income while the top 10% receives almost 25%. It does not take a genius to work out that we live in an unequal society in respect of income levels and take-home pay. The TASC report finds that insufficient pay is the primary cause of that inequality. The report's author, Dr. Robert Sweeney, said this morning that if one wants to really reduce inequality in the future we have to tackle low pay.

We know with housing, because we have been told time and again, that quite outside of those who find themselves in emergency accommodation or find themselves on homeless lists, we have a hidden hardship, a whole hidden generation of people who sleep in their Ma's box room or who sofa-surf and we have more who will never have the aspiration of owning their own home and more who struggle to pay the rent. There are more people who are in work but who are worried that if anything goes wrong or another bill arrives on the mat, their domestic situation goes under.

Will the Taoiseach adopt, as policy, the payment of a living wage and to move from minimum wage payment, as our floor or our threshold? That would be the right thing to do.

The interview with Owen Keegan, CEO of Dublin City Council, the biggest local and housing authority in the country, in The Sunday Business Post on the housing and homelessness crisis was, to some extent, very revealing, to a large extent, absolutely shocking, and, to a significant extent, absolutely unacceptable. I want to know what the Taoiseach thinks of his comments. They come as part of a pattern of trying to normalise homelessness and, incredibly, victim-blaming, suggesting that somehow homeless services were "attractive" to people because we had so many of them and they were so good. The implication was that people want to get into homelessness services. I have never met a person who wanted to get into homelessness services and who was not in absolute dire need. He also made very alarming statements about the wider policy remit of local authorities, of the State and of the private market. Does the Taoiseach agree or disagree with this? The head of the biggest local authority in the country, someone who is appointed by Government, said:

Housing supply is going to have to be delivered by private sector even if we end up renting a significant number of units. We will only ever build a small proportion.

He went on to say that social mix is not happening because, in many cases, the 10% we were supposed to get-----

I thank the Deputy whose time is up.

Does the Taoiseach agree with that? A small proportion-----

The Taoiseach will not have time to answer if the Deputy does not give him a chance.

It demonstrates a rotten attitude by the authorities that are supposed to be dealing with this housing and homelessness crisis. Mr. Keegan admitted that the private sector was failing but then went on to say that we have to rely on the private sector and that our homelessness services are so wonderful they are acting as a magnet. It is not on.

We are going to have to change this from Taoiseach's questions to statements to the Taoiseach. I call Deputy Micheál Martin.

The Taoiseach will remember that one of the five communication priorities for Government which he announced early last year was the promotion of the national children's hospital. He put in place a special budget in his own Department for this matter. When challenged on this in the Dáil, he repeatedly said that advertising of the children's hospital and the national development plan, NDP, in general was essential, because the public needed to be informed about what was being done with their money. Depending on what timeline one starts from, there is an overspend of anything up to €400 million if it is last year, and nearly €700 million more from the Taoiseach's time as Minister for Health. In terms of delayed projects and the need to completely revisit costing assumptions, can the Taoiseach tell us when he intends to update the list of claims and projects he published last year for the NDP? On the health capital plan alone, a combination of health capital inflation and new specifications on safety and technology will apply to the entire acute hospital building programme, not just to the children's hospital. At best it is insulting to the public to claim that nothing will change in the NDP and that everything will be done as promised. The attempt to only talk about re-profiling this year is the exact opposite of the openness that he has repeatedly promised and which justified huge marketing budgets. Can he give us a simple commitment to publish immediately an updated national development plan list of projects and timings? I can list a whole range of projects for which we are still awaiting timelines. One gets the sense that there is a real lack of precision on what was announced last year.

On the last question Deputy Martin asked, there is a tracker on the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform's website which tracks all the projects, the timelines, when they are happening, which ones are running ahead of schedule and which ones are running behind and are not. The Deputy made a valid point in that construction inflation will not just affect the national children's hospital and will, of course, affect other projects. As it happens, road projects and water projects are all coming in on budget or even below budget. I am not entirely sure about the schools projects but I believe they are fairly okay. Road and water are okay. It would be wrong to assume that the national children's hospital is going to be the only project where construction inflation is an issue as it may well be an issue for other projects. There is provision for a review of Project Ireland 2040, and the mid-term review also. It may well be the case that we have to make adjustments over the course of it, and that was always intended.

I note Deputies mentioned the TASC report, and I will come to that in a second, but the most important survey released today was one produced by the CSO, which is an independent body and not a think-tank. The labour force survey was out today. The good news is that 2.3 million people were in work in Ireland at the end of 2018, which is a record high. Unemployment is down to 128,000 people, which is a ten year low. More than 1,000 new jobs were created every week, the vast majority of which were full-time. Deputies may be interested to know that it also showed that the number of people who are self-employed had actually fallen last year. The narrative we often hear from the Opposition is that there is a drift towards self-employment and that all the new jobs are part-time jobs, but the opposite is actually the case.

Almost all of the new jobs are full time and the numbers in self-employment are actually going down in raw numbers and percentage terms of the full workforce. It proves the inaccuracy of the claims made throughout the course of last year by some elements of the Opposition. The biggest increases which should not surprise people are in services and construction.

In terms of the TASC report, I had an opportunity, not to read it yet, but to listen to one of its authors speak on radio and to skim over it earlier today. It confirms that the levels of poverty and deprivation in Ireland are falling and have been for several years, that income inequality in Ireland is about average and less than in most English speaking countries and about average when one compares-----

That is after social welfare payments-----

That is correct.

It is gross income that is-----

Please allow the Taoiseach-----

I do understand these things. The Deputy does not need to lecture me. The Deputy is correct - it is income inequality in take home pay after transfers are taken into account.

It is very severe. That is our point.

We have been told, Deputy, that there is to be no lecturing of the Taoiseach.

I would not dream of lecturing the Taoiseach. I would not be able to.

I am only repeating his words in order that we fully understand.

It points out also that in terms of income inequality, it has been broadly stable for a very long time in Ireland. Therefore, the narrative that inequality is widening and that poverty is getting worse in Ireland is not correct. The TASC report, CSO data and EUROSTAT data all bear that out. It points out, as Deputy Burton rightly pointed out, that the tax and welfare systems are highly progressive, with the richest 10% paying about 80% of income taxation, and that the taxation system is funding a welfare system that distributes so well that this is a country that is no less and no more unequal than developed countries in the rest of the world. If one looks at the report, it indicates that Ireland has a real issue with low pay but not actually in cash terms. The minimum wage is now the second highest. If one compares pay levels across the public sector and the private sector with the exact same for people working in other countries, pay levels here are actually higher, but they are low relative to the fact that we have a lot of people in Ireland on high pay rates, particularly professionals and people who work in the multinationals. It is a more complex picture than perhaps is understood by Deputies, at least judging from their comments. The minimum wage has increased considerably in recent years, I think by about 25% under the Government.

It is done on the basis of recommendations made by the Low Pay Commission. The United Kingdom already has a living wage, but it is actually lower than the minimum wage here.

It renamed the minimum wage.

The key is not what one calls it, be it a "minimum wage" or a "living wage", because that is not-----

It is the latter.

What is important is how one calculates it. I firmly believe that if one calculates it, one has to take into account the views of trade unions that represent working people and those of the public, but one also needs to take into account the views of employers and small business owners. One of the problems with the living wage as it is calculated in Ireland is that employers are excluded from participating in the calculation. Their views are not taken into account. That is a mistake because one always has to bear in mind the impact on employment, which is particularly important in the Border counties where employers are competing with much lower wages on offer in Northern Ireland. Whether one calls it a minimum wage or a living wage does not bother me, but a system that excludes employers from any involvement in calculating it is wrong-headed.

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