Mr. Angel Gurría:

Regarding getting people back to work, particularly youth unemployment, we would be very honoured, and we are certainly ready, to work with Ireland and for Ireland in doing an analysis or an update of the analysis we did a few years ago of jobs. What the Deputy is suggesting is that certain sectors in particular - she mentioned the construction sector specifically - have both an institutional and a market failure, the institutional one being the agencies that were set up in order to provide special training and which did not fly. The market is not working, evidently, because it is producing price bubbles. Ireland is not alone in this regard but this is no consolation. Australia, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands - all these countries contain certain cities in which housing has become unaffordable. It is not an issue throughout the entire countries affected. An example of this problem is Stockholm, Sweden, which has a waiting list of 600,000 who want access to rentals because the rental market there is not very well developed. Therefore, even in the best social democracies, the welfare states, housing in certain parts of the capitals are becoming unaffordable either to rent or to buy. This requires public policies. In our chapter on housing in Ireland, we say, among other things, that supply needs to increase. There are financing issues but there are also land use issues. We recommend possible modifications in order that Ireland can have better land rezoning. I ask my colleagues to feel free to chip in if they think something needs to be said. This is a very difficult problem and goes all the way from China to Australia, passing through Ireland and the UK, which is in a very bad way. The UK has a very specific zoning and land use problem. The rigidity or lack of flexibility there sometimes produces these distortions and then housing is suddenly made impossible, which is an issue. This tends to exacerbate inequality - or rather inequalities. There is inequality of income, inequality of accumulated wealth and inequality of opportunity. Of course, to the extent that housing is unaffordable, this also provides for a rigidity. It is not easy for someone who knows there is a job waiting here for him or her to move because the problem is that he or she must live somewhere. If the living is impossible, this becomes very difficult.

The Deputy mentioned a living wage. There are different ways to take this on. In the case of Ireland, it used to have 15% unemployment and it is now 6%. As we have documented, wages are recovering - not from 2008 and 2009 and the big crisis, but from 2011 when they dropped further again. What does this mean? That means that the scarcity of labour, talent and skills is producing a recovery in the wages simply because supply and demand is acting. The country has more demand, investment is coming in and it needs more skilled labour. Wages are actually increasing. It is more than just providing money to people, although in some cases that must be done for the vulnerable. It is a question of providing skills, upskilling and reskilling.

Ireland presided over economic revitalisation in a way and it knows how important it is. However, it has this paradox. There is a bunch of people saying they cannot find a job and a bunch of companies claiming they cannot find the talent. The two cannot be matched because people's skills are not consistent with what the companies need. We need to be better at getting the Government, the private sector, the productive sector, the trade unions, the individuals and the universities to produce the right kinds of skills so that they match. We would then be better able to address the question of inequality.

Last, but not least, I come to the reputation of Ireland in terms of taxation. The former Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, went to the OECD and basically offered to dismantle the double-Irish system. Ireland did so and three years later it was no longer there. Today the big issue is the Apple case and the €13 billion. This would no longer be possible because the mechanisms that made it possible are no longer in place. It is something from the past that has to be addressed, but it could not be repeated today. People do not know this. People do not generally know that Ireland has dismantled the system that made it possible to have such a situation in the past.

We took Ireland's solution to the Dutch and we said: "Double-Irish is no more; how about dealing with the double-Dutch?" and they did. Then we took this to the UK and they did. Eventually we now have more of a level playing field by dismantling these special systems where basically all companies are treated the same, but not with the same level of taxation. Each country has a different level of corporate taxation as long as it treats them all the same.