Ms Patricia King:

The Deputy is right about the gender pay gap. Even in the private sector, the recent Morgan McKinley report stated that the gap was 16%, although another narrative has that at 14%. There should be no gap.

There are a number of contributing factors. Child care is a major factor in people, particularly women, being debarred from the workforce and from developing and utilising their skills. If they have children during their careers, they are penalised in the labour market for that period. Consider also the rates at which men and women progress.

All of that would indicate that if, as I have done myself, one has reared children, that is not going to be a help in one's career. We have got to change a lot of attitudes. For example, though I will not say that it will solve all of the problems, I would advocate one of the things that is being proposed, even in the UK, which is that companies with more than 250 employees would have to show their statistics on the gender pay gap, how women are not progressing and related matters. That sort of name and shame stuff starts to build awareness and actually gets people to acknowledge that there is an issue and a problem.

We could have a much longer conversation about this. I saw recent CSO figures on employment levels in the Irish economy for 2016. They said there were 1.06 million males working in the economy and 895,000 females. There was a little piece in it in respect of those who are engaged in home care duties. They registered 10,000 men engaged in home care duties for 2016 and 435,000 women. That in itself paints a picture. The only good thing about it was that I looked at the 2014 figures and there were 465,000 women in 2014 so it is going in the right direction.

There is a whole big picture that we certainly do not have time to discuss but it is unacceptable. Policy-makers, in our judgment, should spend some time working with those of us who are trying to get rid of that inequality in the system. To me, there is not lot of engagement on it. There is in particular areas, but it is seen as specific problem rather than an overall labour market issue.

On the issue of the various different grades in the public service, our judgment has been, as the committee will know, these were cuts that were imposed. We tried to mitigate as far as we could and we only got so far in the Haddington Road agreement. I was engaged in that myself so I am fairly familiar with it. We have asked the public service pay commission to look at this because I have been on record several times in 2016 saying that different rates of pay are untenable and cause all sorts of internal friction, regardless of whether one is in the private or public sector. Whoever dreamt them up, they should not have passed the test on human resources never mind trade unionism. They are, in my judgment, a long-drawn-out problem which ultimately leads people to see an inequity in the system. They should not have been imposed in the period of austerity. We have asked the commission to consider and address it in an ongoing way, apart from the disputes that people are legitimately involved in to try to address it.