Mr. Paul Cullen:

Further to what the Chairman said about the early engagement, I recall that the Minister was here in December before the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council at a stage when the annual growth survey and the draft joint employment report had been published. They are some of the building blocks of the semester. As the Secretary General said, we will be in receipt of country-specific recommendations this fourth semester. This is the ultimate in cross-cutting in that the semester and package of country-specific recommendations address research and development, energy, credit support for SMEs and employment issues. It is in the employment sphere that the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation facilitates and seeks to integrate the contributions of the Departments of Social Protection and Education and Skills. As the Minister said back in December, we can expect country-specific recommendations this year on labour market participation, active labour market policies, poverty and social inclusion and education and skills. Those are four of the six areas at which country-specific recommendations are usually targeted under the employment and social pillar. The other two areas are wages policy issues and what is called labour market segmentation, which is the problem in southern Europe where young people are excluded from jobs because of the over-reliance on fixed-term contracts. Broadly speaking, the Commission acknowledges in the range of reports that we do not have problems in either of those two spheres. To some extent, we know what its targets will be because it is also telling us that there will not be such a great shift from what we understood to be our concerns in the context of the memorandum of understanding and the relations with the troika. So it will be looking to some extent at the continuation of projects such as Pathways to Work, SOLAS and the roll-out of the education and training boards. So there will not be that many surprises.

That is also one of the issues that member states have been critically conveying to the Commission. The manner in which the Commission has sought to allay the concerns of the member states is through what has been a steady evolution of the semester. In this fourth semester, the ground is being laid through a series of three bilaterals. The first took place in November, the second will take place within a fortnight and the third will take place in April at the stage when the member states are presenting their national reform programmes. In our case, the kind of framework of reference for the CSRs will be the history of how we emerged from the memorandum of understanding and what we are putting into the national reform programme. That is building on the Action Plan for Jobs, Pathways to Work and the strategic plan for SOLAS and how it will give messages to the education and training boards that will emerge from the Department of Education and Skills in March.

It is interesting that while we were not part of the semester other than being observers, we were in a management role in the context of the Presidency. We were credited with smoothing out some of the recurrent problems within that and reinforcing the role of what are called the preparatory committees that service the respective councils. The key councils are ECOFIN and the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council with the Competitiveness Council feeding in through ECOFIN by and large on SMEs and credit issues and the education committee and the social protection committee feeding in to the employment committee. A lot of work takes place before the ultimate delivery of the Commission's country-specific recommendations in that there is a review of how countries have been implementing the recommendations they got last year. To some extent, we are jumping into a relay race because we are not under scrutiny for how we delivered on the country-specific recommendations of last year but we have been in there in the sense that our national reform programme for 2013 was on the board. Equally, what we were doing under the memorandum of understanding was very transparent.