Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

Market forces are great when markets work but they do not work in quasi-monopoly circumstances. This issue must be addressed. We are falling behind in this area and I invite the Minister to consider it.

The second issue that must be considered was drawn to my attention by a constituent by way of coincidence. It is alluded to in page 11, paragraph 34, of the Presidency conclusions:

Human capital is Europe's most important asset. Member States should step up their efforts to raise the general standard of education and reduce the number of early school-leavers, in particular by continuing with the Education and Training 2010 work programme. Lifelong learning is a sine qua non . . .

One knows the script.

A 34 year old constituent who works as a hospital porter in a major hospital in Dublin approached me. He is facing the possibility of being a hospital porter for the rest of his life. He is reasonably well paid but has ambitions and wants to be trained as a paramedic. It will cost him €3,000 in fees. He is prepared to pay this himself and is not looking for a grant for this amount. The hospital in which he works, Tallaght Hospital, is prepared to give him leave of absence but evidently cannot pay him. When he presents to those responsible for social welfare, they are incapable of presenting him with money. He is prepared to go on the equivalent of social welfare and would survive if he did so. His wife works part-time and they have two young children aged nine and 11. They live just off the South Circular Road in south-east Dublin. He is a solid, conscientious taxpaying worker who wants to upgrade himself but he simply cannot do so and there is nowhere in the State where he can do so. This makes paragraph 34 a nonsense because we cannot reach out to people who themselves want to climb up the ladder and acquire the skills they aspire to have. I am not referring to a person who is very old or who left school a long time ago. He is only 34.

There is no way our system works. In the past, we introduced the back to work allowance scheme and the enterprise allowance scheme. The Government operated the latter after I left the Department of Labour. All of these measures were to address labour market failure. In terms of the Lisbon strategy, this is labour market failure and we have no domestic instruments to address it. I invite the Minister to examine this.

The third issue about which I want to talk is sustainability. Ireland has probably the worst performance in terms of adherence to the Kyoto Protocol. Now that the Russian Federation has signed up to the protocol, sustainability has become a reality and we should address it.

I was not present to hear the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government give answers in the House and therefore I may be doing him a disservice. Is a sustainability criterion being run like a slide rule over every Government measure, as was the case in respect of gender-proofing and assessing impacts in terms of cost or personnel? Members will recall the requirement of the Department of Finance that the impact of every proposal be measured in terms of cost and gender. Do we now have a measure for sustainability?

Was the relaxation in the rules pertaining to rural housing subject to such a sustainability measure? By giving people the right to build a house on their family lands, ten kilometres or 12 km from the local village, are we now guaranteeing they will have to make two car trips per day while their children are going to primary school? If one had made sites available on the periphery of the village, they could have walked to school. These issues involve individual, complex choices and I understand fully the arguments of those involved. To make the point without trying to be simplistic, we are not addressing to a satisfactory level the issue of sustainability, as referred to in the conclusions. The Taoiseach and Ministers realise this themselves. I hazard a guess that there was no measure of sustainability applied in determining the impact of rural housing.

Next year a directive is to come into effect that will measure the energy efficiency of housing. We are facing serious fines. I know I am stealing some of the environmental thunder of my constituency colleague, Deputy Gormley, in this regard. The environment is no longer a fringe issue and it is central to the Lisbon strategy. Europe is the most densely populated continent of all five continents. We must address these issues and if we do not, we will very quickly slide down the league table. We have managed to climb to the top of the league table in respect of many other indicators.

I join the leader of the Fine Gael party in congratulating the Government, particularly the Minister for Foreign Affairs, on the honour conferred on him personally and the country when he was made special envoy for United Nations reform by Kofi Annan. The Minister has a very difficult task and will be absent from the House quite often. We and his colleagues will have to give him some leeway and I hope he gets the extra resources necessary to undertake this role.

Reform of the United Nations is critically important for the reasons Deputy Kenny stated, which I will not repeat. If we do not reform the United Nations, it will fail. Many would argue that it has effectively failed, particularly the neocons in the United States. They want it to fail in the same way that Hitler and Mussolini wanted the League of Nations to fail in the 1930s. If it fails, the rule of international law will go with it. Tenuous, limited, fragile, incomplete and imperfect as the United Nations manifestly is, it is not easily replaced. What does one replace it with?

The Minister's mission is incredibly important and I wish him every success. If he believes Members of this House, including those of my party, can be of assistance in this regard, he should inform them. This issue goes way beyond the argy-bargy of national politics and the rivalries and democratic competition that comprise a healthy part of what we do here. It is a question of the rules that underpin the playing pitch upon which every democratic party political participant or citizen participates, be he or she on the pitch or in the stand. It is therefore very important and the Government should afford it the priority it deserves. I wish the Minister well in this respect.

On Europe and Deputy Kenny's comments, it is pertinent to recognise that the emotional driving force that underpinned the European project in the 1950s and 1960s and, to a certain extent, in the period until the early 1980s has run out of steam. This is because the participants are dead. Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand were the last two national leaders who actually remembered the war and participated therein. Theo Waigel told me he was 12 years of age when the war had ended. He had a memory of it but it was not seared into his heart or physical experience. He remembered the aftermath, as did Gerhard Schröder. However, they did not fight or lose friends who were killed. Without such a memory there is no way that the Germans or French would have agreed to the reunification of Germany. Just think of the Franco-Prussian war, the pride of France and the burying of the deutschmark, which was the trade-off. One will not find this written down but any French or German diplomat will tell one this was the deal. Ruud Lubbers lost the Presidency of the Commission because he hesitated. Being a neighbour of the Germans, he had certain reservations about a reunited Germany, just as I would have had if I were a Dutchman. I believe the Taoiseach may have been present in some capacity at the meeting at which he was vetoed. The aforementioned push factor was incredibly strong. I have just given one illustration but there are millions. This factor is no longer present and we must find a way of igniting a new kind of emotional push factor. Globalisation is not permanent or guaranteed. We had globalisation until the Great War in 1914. There was the gold standard, international communications and transport, and various other connections. This disappeared because it was a free trade zone and nothing else. If globalisation cannot be civilised to include rights for workers, environmental protection and the rule of law it will collapse in a sorry mess just like the 20th century collapse in 1914. The only force that can civilise international capitalism and tame globalisation is an enlarged European Union. That is why the constitutional treaty is so important.

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