Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

If my recollection is correct in relation to the St. Andrews Agreement, part of the difficulty on the commitment on the Irish language Act was that it was not in the St. Andrews Agreement. It was in a sort of side agreement between the Taoiseach and the British Prime Minister at the time. That is one of the reasons why it has not been implemented. It is a shame that it has been caught up in the current dispute about getting institutions back up and running and it is a shame that people see the Irish language as some sort of threat in any way. The Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act in Scotland does not make Scotland any less British and the Welsh Language Act in Wales does not make Wales any less British, and it is a shame that it has got caught up in that whole constitutional question that always divides people in Northern Ireland. As somebody who loves the language, I would like to see some sort of progress, such as official recognition for the language, a language commissioner, and so on. Once that is there, it can be built on. I am a great believer in the power of incrementalism, and we need an incremental approach to this so as to reassure people with a British unionist, loyalist or Protestant identity that this is not something to be afraid of or something that is being pushed on them. The Deputy will have heard some of the wild stories that have been floating around about people being forced to learn Irish or having quotas for people in the Civil Service, but none of those things were ever really proposed. It is a shame that that has become part of the narrative north of the Border.

Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan raised the issue of contradictory policies, and I hear her on that. When it comes to tax, we have made some really big changes in the past couple of years, such as getting rid of stateless corporations and the double Irish. I am not sure whether that is fully appreciated by some of our critics. We are now one of the few countries that fully shares its revenue information with other countries. The only way one can know if a company is not paying tax anywhere is if every revenue authority shares that information, and we are one of the ones doing that. We are now deeply engaged with the OECD on what we are going to do to make sure that big digital companies pay their fair share of tax. Big profitable companies should pay their fair share of tax, although they do not always do so. We also need to make sure that whatever reforms we sign up to do not hollow out our own tax base. There was a view in the past that Ireland was under-taxing corporations but if that was true in the past, it is certainly not true now. The warnings we get from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and others indicate the opposite, which is that we are over-reliant on the massive amounts of money we are now taking in from those corporations, and we need to bear that in mind too.

There can be apparent contradictions in other areas, such as the fact that we promote breastfeeding through our health and well-being programmes, and then promote baby milk through our other agencies. Those contradictions are not lost on me but they might take a bit of time to unwind.

On childcare, Deputy Farrell mentioned the issues around rates of pay and how they are linked to quality, and he is correct in that regard. At the same time, we also need to bear in mind how higher rates of pay will impact on costs for parents. It is likely that some form of sectoral employment order for the sector will happen in the medium term. It is not heavily unionised at present but if it were to become more unionised, there would be a case for a sectoral employment order to set minimum pay standards across the sector.