Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Before I answer the Deputy's question directly, I will say a brief word about the earlier point that she put to me, as it is important to me. She raised the question with me previously, but I was not in a position to answer it fully then. She asked about where we were in terms of diversity in our appointees, particularly through the Public Appointments Service, PAS. In 2017, the proportion of female appointees through PAS was 52% of all appointments. Since discussing the matter with the Deputy, I recently spoke at an event at the Institute of Directors in Ireland where I said that this was a pace of change that I wanted to see continue. From what I see in my Departments, we are making progress on a number of levels - by levels, I mean tiers within Departments - but when we reach certain strata, the degree of progress is not what I want. I want to ensure that we continue making progress on this year after year.

Regarding what we are doing to respond to the new Ireland that is growing up in our primary and secondary schools, the PAS is working with NGOs that represent the range of nationalities to which the Deputy referred. Within that, we are particularly focused on the country's Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Latvian and Brazilian communities. To promote public service job opportunities across Ireland, we are moving into a space where the PAS will be targeting the awareness of jobs in those communities via social media. We will also ensure that the same work is done to focus on our Traveller, LGBTI and disabilities communities and Irish language groups. This important piece of work will continue within the PAS.

At a practical level, we have redesigned the various websites that our citizens may use to become aware of job opportunities to incorporate new technology to support candidates who have disabilities or use English as a foreign language. The main reason for doing this is that the citizens who depend on these services are changing in front of our eyes. As families grow up and kids leave school, we need public services that reflect the make-up of modern Ireland. The community that the Deputy and I live in reflects how we can do that well. We are going to keep at it.

To answer the Deputy's question on section 39 organisations directly, we are further advanced in dealing with this matter than we were earlier in the year. We have put together a process, which has been acknowledged by the representatives of employees in the section 39 organisations, to better understand and penetrate what has happened.

Even from the initial work we have done, it is showing different things happened in different organisations. I acknowledge that it is the case that wage differentials are developing in some organisations. We will have to reflect on what that means. It is not the case for all organisations, however, and different organisations responded in different ways.

We are now on the third round of wage change in the public service. The previous two rounds of public service wage change happened in a way that did not cause the difficulties the Deputies raised now. We will need to get a better picture of what has happened in the section 39 organisations in their entirety. I hope we will make progress in getting to that understanding in the coming weeks.