Dr. Seán Healy:

The point made by Deputy Bruton is absolutely critical. We will not have a situation where nobody is worse off. There will be losers as well as winners in this process. To get agreement on where we go, we should focus on two things. The first is the need for a new social contract. The old social contract is broken. We have had it for over 40 years and while it worked in the past, however one analyses it, the bottom line is that it is not working now. People do not believe that the contract between them and the State is valid in the way that it was previously. The idea of a new social contract is critically important.

The only way to get a new social contract is to have a social dialogue process in which we involve all of the stakeholders. It beggars belief that the Government continues to try to drive serious change without consulting or engaging in a real way with people and sectors. We are involved in consultation every day of the week but most of it is just box-ticking. It is not really consultation. We need a proper social dialogue process. In the context of social dialogue, I am talking about the five pillars that were there before. That is our starting position. Employers, trade unions, farmers, the community and voluntary sector and the environmental pillar should be involved. We can also expand on that and I am not saying that they are the only ones that should be involved. We can adjust it but we cannot leave any one of them out. I have a fear that when the Government talks about social dialogue, it is talking about employers and trade unions, full stop. There is a process under which they meet from time to time and it seems to work, up to a point at least, but the problem with that is that if one is not at the table when these things are being negotiated, one is going to end up on the menu. That is exactly what has been happening to people who are poor, marginalised and vulnerable.

The other piece in that process is that we then have a mechanism for driving that down to local level, namely the public participation networks that I mentioned earlier. It is possible to have genuine social dialogue that looks at a range of issues and not just one, which would represent a sort of siloing. It must look at all of the issues and then determine how climate can be dealt with. The aim is to arrive at a new social contract under which people recognise that they will lose this, that or the other but will gain in other ways. The five things that a new social contract should be working towards are the development of a vibrant economy, decent services and infrastructure, just taxation, good governance and sustainability. When I say sustainability, I am referring to economic, social and environmental sustainability. They are the five main pieces.