Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank and welcome the Minister of State. I also thank her officials for the work they have been doing across Europe. I have attended a number of COSAC and EU presidential meetings and every delegation I met spoke about the Irish border and the Irish problem regarding Brexit. That can only be down to the work of the Tánaiste and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Minister of State and their officials. People may not fully appreciate the level of effort that has been put in right across Europe to getting this unique Irish problem recognised and encouraging a cohesive response on the part of the 27 member states. The Minister of State is to be congratulated for that.

I have already said privately and I am now going to say publicly that I am always most impressed when I see the Minister of State, the Tánaiste, Deputy Coveney, and the Taoiseach. They are always at one. It is the type of cohesiveness we need. I am really proud of the work that has been done across the issue.

Brexit is now the secondary problem in Europe. The key problem is migration and the difficulties it is causing right across Europe. The results in recent elections show the impact it has had. It impacted on the UK referendum. We have to get away from the one-size-fits-all approach. If one happens to be on the Mediterranean, one is a refugee. We must start clearly identifying economic migrants and refugees. No country in the European Union would reject genuine refugees. Economic migration is different and those who find themselves in certain parts of eastern Europe - or in Ireland - do not want to be there, they want to be in countries with larger economies such as Great Britain, Germany and France. In order to save the European project, we have to start dealing with this quickly.

The Erasmus+ project has always interested me as an educator and as a person who came to education late in life. We have concentrated quite a lot of those whom I would deem as members of the privileged class who made it to university. I would love to see something similar in the apprenticeship area to drive apprentice-sharing across Europe. There will be a logistics conference in Dublin on 22 March. This will deal with logistics, driver training for the use of heavy good vehicles, etc. There is no Irish representation in that particular group but a former colleague of mine, an assistant general secretary in the TUI, actually attracted that conference. I hope we will see some co-operation on apprenticeships.

The Minister of State addressed social dialogue and the gender pay gap, which is a disgrace. We have been talking about this since Adam was a boy and we still have not started to treat females in the same way that we treat males. It is absolutely outrageous. This morning, I spoke in the Seanad and tomorrow we celebrate 100 years of female suffrage. Look around the Dáil and Seanad and see how many women there are.