Dara Murphy (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for coming before the committee. Three excellent opening presentations were made. Perhaps the most important comment came at the very end from Mr. Donohoe that within the debate on labour activation and other measures, what Europe needs is growth. We see it here with unemployment reducing below 13% and quite a fantastic 5,000 jobs per month being created. With regard to how the macroeconomic balance procedure could be worked in, we spoke about this last week with reference to the Federal Reserve in the United States compared to the ECB. It has an absolute mandate to consider unemployment figures in the United States in conjunction with its broader remit for monetary policy. If the overlap may be confusing, would we be better to push it further up the line to the ECB altogether?

To an extent I agree with the point on having unemployment insurance at national level, but we have had a very poor debate in Ireland on labour mobility. Perhaps understandably it was badly handled with regard to unemployed people and suggestions on job opportunities in places such as United States. Nonetheless Europe has 2 million job vacancies and in our country we have job vacancies in certain areas. How do we address the issue of social insurance for people who are working so they can come back and have access to benefits again?

My next question is to Mr. O'Connor with regard to active inclusion. The committee is the first in the European Union to have this discussion with the Commission, which was quite glad to have been invited by the Chairman. We had an opportunity to make very strong representation. Mr. O'Connor mentioned encouraging people to engage with services and supports. Does he not see such encouragement to engage as positive? How would he improve it? If people are not encouraged to engage, in what other ways will they achieve? It is a very strong point and a new one for the committee.

My next questions are a little technical with regard to the mean and median. What are the headline indicators? This is one of the areas on which the committee was fishing for advice last week, particularly from the representative from the Commission. Will Mr. Callan give us an example of the choice between the mean or the median indicator on gross disposable household income? Why is going with the median more preferable? With regard to coherent principles underlying the measurement process, Mr. Callan did not make suggestions.