Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. David Begg:

Now, from my point of view, you know, social partnership was a critical engagement. It's ... it doesn't mean that everybody thinks and acts exactly the same. As I explained earlier on, we were following a model which is prevalent in the small open economies of northern Europe, and which goes back, actually, to the 1930s and it's based on a belief that, look, if you are a small, open economy and you're trying to survive the ravages of international markets, you basically ... the best way to try and do that is to be as flexible as possible, to engage with the economic conditions at the time, with appropriate social protections for the population at large. I would never contend that social partnership reached its apotheosis at any stage while I was there, in the sense of protecting those people. The point you make is quite right, that these conditions regarding housing and so on were very, very difficult, and as a matter of fact, again I refer back to that speech I made in 2008, and I ask you just to have a look at it in close detail again, because it deals with a lot of these questions and it did particularly draw attention to the need to focus on, you know, four or five or six critical objectives that were necessary in order to protect people, affordable housing being one of them. And there's a very strong critique in that speech about the difficulties of trying to make the affordable housing agency work so that ordinary working people who couldn't afford to take part in this property bubble would actually have the opportunity to get a house. And, as I explained earlier on, sure I experienced this myself in my own family, where members of my family had to go living 60 miles away from where they worked and, you know, look, it didn't work, that didn't work, I don't mind admitting that, but we definitely made a strong attempt to make something like that work. And at the end of the day, and this is my last point, Chair, sorry, I'll finish up on it, I won't say another word about this, but going back to the era of young Jim Larkin in 1916, young Jim made a speech at one stage when he was dealing with a considerable amount of wage militancy in the ... in the trade union movement at the time, and he said, as simple as this: "What do we do about poor hospitals? Ask for more wages. What do we do about poor housing? Ask for more wages. What do we do about unemployment? Ask for more wages. What do we do with underemployment? Ask for more wages." He was pointing out that you need a much more holistic approach, including the social wage, to protect people. And that's the difference here we see today. Like, we're now the recipients of a model from Germany, which appears here as hard-nosed neoliberalism. It doesn't appear that way in Germany because it is located in the context of a social market economy in Germany, where German citizens have access to all of these public services at a level that saves them quite a lot on their basic income. So that's what we were trying to do. We never got the model perfect, you know, and probably we won't at this stage, for obvious reasons, but I think it was a good thing to do and it is the right thing to do and as I indicated in my earlier evidence, I believe that's the way the country should go again in the future.

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