Ms Michelle Murphy:

I thank the Chairman and committee members. Social Justice Ireland welcomes the invitation to discuss with the joint committee the semester process and the national reform programme.

The Europe 2020 strategy was designed to develop a more balanced and sustainable approach to the future of Europe. We welcomed the strategy at the time. It is a significant development for social policy within the European Union because it includes targets aimed at increasing employment, improving education and reducing poverty and social exclusion. It highlights the importance of social policy goals, in addition to economic goals. We have engaged with the Europe 2020 process since 2010 and the semester process since 2013 when Ireland emerged from the bailout process. We publish an annual assessment of the national reform programme and also a broader European report looking at social and economic trends within the European Union as a whole.

I will briefly go through some of the recommendations made in our review of the 2016 national reform programme. We look at three of the five headline targets. They are the employment target, the education target and the target for poverty and social exclusion. The findings made in the report conclude that the policies pursued for many years still result in the ongoing exclusion of people on the margins of society. Ireland is still not close to reaching many of its national targets, particularly in terms of poverty and social exclusion.

This is a concern for Social Justice Ireland. Obviously, economic and social development and environmental protection are complementary in the approach of the Europe 2020 strategy. We believe that inclusive growth is about fostering social cohesion as well as a high employment economy, so this should be integral to the response of the Irish Government.

As regards the key findings and our recommendations, Social Justice Ireland welcomes the recent improvements in employment in Ireland. They are very welcome after a difficult period. However, we note the ongoing problem of long-term unemployment and we recommend, given the recent improvements, that the Government set a more ambitious national target of reducing unemployment to at least 4%. We also recommend that it set two sub-targets. One is that long-term unemployment be reduced to 1.3% of the labour force. The second sub-target relates to addressing policies to tackle the working poor issue, where people are in employment but are still at risk of poverty. Last year, this was identified as a trend to watch by the social protection committee in Europe.

The funding issues in education in Ireland are well known, not just in higher education but also in early childhood education and care. In addition, lifelong learning is key to addressing the needs of people who are distant from the labour market or are in danger of losing their jobs. We have three recommendations in this area. The first is the Government should set a more ambitious target on early school leaving. We have achieved the 8% target so it should set a national target of 5% for the remainder of the process. The second is to adopt an ambitious adult literacy target to reduce the proportion of the population with restricted literacy to 5% by 2020. The third is to adopt the 15% target for participation in lifelong learning, to be consistent with the national skills strategy published last year.

In terms of poverty and social exclusion, Ireland is still a distance from achieving its overall target and its sub-target on child poverty. One of the main policies we continue to propose is that social impact assessments are carried out prior to the introduction of policy measures, particularly in respect of the budget, to ensure they do not have a disproportionate impact on people in the lower socio-economic groups. As regards a revision of Ireland's target, we suggest that the target should be to reduce the consistent poverty rate to 2% by 2020. However, within that target there should be subsidiary targets for vulnerable groups, such as children, lone parents, jobless households, because Ireland is a particular outlier in terms of jobless households, and people living in social and rented accommodation.

With regard to governance, the Europe 2020 strategy is designed to have a partnership approach and ongoing engagement at national, regional and local level and with civil society. In Ireland we are very lucky that civil society has good engagement with the European Semester office in Dublin. We are very involved in the national reform programme, NRP, process in the European Semester. That is down to the excellent work by the Semester officers there. It is important that there is further participation and engagement in this process so that citizens become aware of the interconnection between our national policies, the European process, our European commitments, the targets that have been set, how those interact on national policies and how to influence them. This is particularly important in light of the recently launched European Pillar of Social Rights to ensure it is a success.

Finally, we have recommendations for the European Semester as a whole. To ensure the coherence of European policy and the European Semester process, we recommend that the social objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy should be integrated into the economic process and the priorities of the annual growth survey should focus on the long-term social objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy. In this regard, efforts to promote growth and jobs must be supported while looking at meeting deficit reduction targets in the medium rather than the short term. It is important that fiscal consolidation measures and country-specific recommendations do not have an adverse impact on countries meeting their social commitments in the Europe 2020 strategy. In this regard, we ask for ex anteappraisal prior to the implementation of fiscal consolidation and structural measures of their impact on vulnerable groups and the cumulative impact they might have. In addition, improved targeting for the process could work, particularly in terms of sub-targets, for example, regarding long-term unemployment or different groups that have a high risk of poverty or social exclusion.

To ensure meaningful input by civil society in the process, it is important that people are made aware of the impact of the European Semester process and the strategy on national policy, the benefits of these strategies, the issues they are designed to address and, important, how to influence them so they do not feel so distant from the process.