Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies opposite for acknowledging so clearly the progress we have made as a country in the past five years. In 2011, when the Government of which I am honoured to be a member came into office, we inherited a broken country and a broken economy. We had lost 250,000 jobs and unemployment was heading towards 500,000. Our debt as a country peaked at 123% of GDP. All our efforts for the past five years have been to rebuild the economic foundations of the State and I thank the Deputies opposite for recognising the job of work that has been done, with the forbearance of the Irish people, in getting us to this place. Three of the four Deputies who have spoken acknowledged that we are out of recession and have no need for any emergency legislation again.

Unfortunately, that is not the full story. Although we have made enormous progress as a country, we still have real challenges. We have 9.3% unemployment, which is still unconscionably high. We need to ensure that everybody is provided with the opportunity to work and that will continue to be the focus of Government policy.

I am very glad we have reopened the recruiting process in the public sector, which means we are recruiting gardaí and nurses again. Since the beginning of January last, we have 700 net new nurses and there have been more than 1,100 trainee gardaí in the Garda training college in Templemore since it reopened. Some 5,500 additional people have been employed in the health services generally since 1 January last year. It is because we have a recovering economy that we can do these things.

I fully appreciate the points of the Deputies opposite in regard to the imposition on public servants. However, the people who suffered most grievously in the economic crash were those who lost their jobs. There are 250,000 people who have no work at all and many tens of thousands were required to leave the country to find work. It is our objective to provide jobs for all those people and also to allow those who wish to do so to come home again. I hope there will be net migration into the country next year of Irish people, with more coming back than are leaving. This is because we have worked so hard to fix the economic mess we inherited.

This is a debate about the Title of the Bill. It is financial emergency legislation because it is amending the suite of financial emergency Acts that are on the Statute Book. We are now beginning the walk-back of the impositions that were put on public servants in asking them to make their contributions. I did not impose this upon them when I came into office. I sat down and negotiated with dozens of unions and their representatives, and we got agreement. The Haddington Road agreement was voted upon. I know there are Deputies opposite who dismissed it before it was even published but it was voted upon by public sector workers who understood they had to make a contribution to fixing our broken economy. As I said 12 months ago, I now want to begin the restoration of that imposition, starting with the lowest paid. The Lansdowne Road agreement focuses entirely on the low paid. Of course, there are measures in the original Haddington Road agreement that will restore pay to all categories of workers who have been cut. Ultimately, and I say this while particularly referencing the points made by Deputy McDonald, any pay that was cut could only be cut on the basis of it being a temporary measure required by an emergency, and it all has to be restored over time.

The timing is set out in the Bill. It is not quick enough for Deputy Fleming, who wants the entire FEMPI edifice pulled down immediately. The additional cost in the FEMPI deal that I had negotiated and that has now been agreed by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions public sector committee, and formally endorsed by workers, is €300 million next year. If I was to pull the whole edifice down, as recommended in the amendments tabled by Deputy Fleming and in his presentation here, I would have to find an additional €1.9 billion because the total cost of FEMPI is €2.2 billion. I am giving back €300 million, €300 million the year after that and €300 million the year after that. As the economy recovers incrementally, that will be done in a phased, orderly way, as I said we would do from the beginning.

There is a notion we can find an additional €1.9 billion - almost €2 billion - immediately. Where would we get that money? We certainly do not have the fiscal space additional to what we have spent. We would have to make an additional €2 billion of cuts or find an additional €2 billion of taxes. The reason that we cannot, under the rules of the House rather than the rules of any Department or Government, simply impose a cost of €1.9 billion is that, if we are going to do that, there is a moral responsibility to say where we are going to make the cuts and find the wherewithal to do that.

Deputy Boyd Barrett said he opposed FEMPI but welcomed the position the country is now in. The problem with Deputy Boyd Barrett is that he opposed everything the Government did for the last four years, so he welcomes the end but denies the means. It is fairyland - get to the right place but do not take any hard decisions en route. Most people understand that is fanciful, not the real world and not the way things can be done. If the Deputy wants a practical example to prove it, he need look no further than Greece, where promises were made to people that could not be delivered. The great irony is that the same government, or a slightly different government but the same main party, has now been re-elected and is doing the very things it railed against when first elected in January of this year.

Deputy Boyd Barrett also mentioned the issue of poverty. We are the only country that went through a programme where inequality reduced - that is the simple fact of it. That was because we maintained the equalisation measures available to any government, which are taxation and social welfare, in a way that was certainly not maintained in any of the other programme countries. I am very proud of that. Very difficult impositions were made on everybody in society as we made our journey of recovery.

The issue of low pay was mentioned. As I said, the focus of the pay restoration in the agreement I put to the unions and that they negotiated with me is almost exclusively focused on low and middle income earners. Of course, there will be pay restitution for everybody over time because that is required. Once the emergency ends, the basis for reducing anybody's pay will end, and that is a simple matter of fact. Again, however, if we look at the most recent statistics, a comparison between public sector and private sector pay shows that the imbalance is at the lower end, where public sector workers are actually paid more than private sector workers. It is vice versaat the top end, where private sector workers are paid more than public workers. That is an interesting fact that is not often instanced.

Deputy Healy focused almost exclusively on pensioners and said they should get everything back immediately. Bluntly, we are trying to do this in a balanced way. There are relatively low paid workers who, for a full 39-hour week, earn less than people who are pensioned at the top. I do not believe it is the right approach that full restoration of pensions should take priority over full restoration of pay. It has to be done in a proportionate and balanced way, as I have set out to do.