Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I compliment all the negotiators who compiled this document. The duration of the negotiations is an indication of the necessity to shift from the old tax trade-off against wage moderation, which is long past its sell-by date. Another approach is required. That is reflected in the comments made by the Taoiseach and by many of the commentators who were directly involved in this process.

I was involved in the process in the past and am familiar with its internal operations and mechanisms. Most of the time it is the social partners and the civil servants who are involved, as the Taoiseach would be the first to admit. Political involvement is limited and tends to come more or less in a Supreme Court manner rather than in a District Court manner, when many of the options have been teased out.

Much work has gone into the agreement and I salute all the people who gave their time to it. Reading the document is wonderful and if its content were to be achieved, we would have heaven on earth. However, I doubt the capacity of this Administration to deliver. The Taoiseach this morning, in response to Leaders' Questions, damned his own competence and that of his Government when he said that after nine years the Government is still trying to talk to the consultants about getting them to the negotiating table or about getting €500,000 worth of equipment operating after 4.30 p.m. The Taoiseach is a man of many talents and abilities but if he can come to that conclusion after nine years, only he can provide the answer.

Last night, I launched a book by Paul Williams entitled The Untouchables. It is about the history of the CAB, which has been in existence for ten years. The Taoiseach will recall that a Private Members' Bill, which was renamed the Proceeds of Crime Bill, was brought forward by the current Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism and was supported by all sides of the House. By the end of July, within four weeks of the death of Veronica Guerin, the House had passed six Bills. The CAB was up and running and was statutorily empowered by October when the House returned after the summer recess. When this House was united following the atrocity of her murder and, indeed, the murder of Jerry McCabe, which preceded it, we moved very quickly.

Looking at this document, little of which I disagree with, although we need more time to examine it in the future, what is strikingly obvious is the absolute inability of this Administration to deliver. I can offer some examples, but I will be positive and discuss the good parts first. On behalf of the Labour Party and the wider labour movement, I welcome the section on employment rights and what the Government proposes to do in that area. As I said to the national council of ISME two weeks ago, the people in the private sector who secretly take pleasure in the demise of the trade union movement as a representative force — approximately one sixth of the workforce is now represented by trade unions and the bulk of that one sixth is in the public service — should be careful what they wish for because what will replace it will be far worse.

What is facing small companies, in particular, and those companies that refused to allow trade unions to represent their workforce is the employment lawyer, who knows adversarial confrontation and will take employers to the cleaners in terms of costs. We have already seen this happen in the Taoiseach's Government offices. Individual public servants are now rushing to lawyers rather than to their public sector unions to address confrontations where there are perceived wrongs in the place of employment.

We have already tried, through the establishment of the PIAB, to get the lawyers off the back of the insurance industry, where 42% of the cost of insurance was due to legal costs. Those who think the retreat of organised labour in the shape of traditional trade unions will make their job easier with regard to employees are seeing a false dawn. The labour movement has transposed individually negotiated rights, whether in Guinness or Jacobs or any of the other old benchmark firms, on to the Statute Book of this republic and they are in place for all. That is the first point that should be made about the role of trade unions in social partnership.

Senator Shane Ross once asked in the Seanad what right trade unions have to negotiate if they only represent a minority of the workforce. They could represent a larger section of the workforce if certain companies allowed them to organise. Many people thank God for the presence of the trade unions at the negotiating table because it is more than their jobs are worth to get a trade union into the workplace.

The norm that is struck in social partnership pay negotiations will filter out beyond the corral of organised trade union members into the entire workforce. To that extent, it is of benefit to people who would like to be represented by trade unions but cannot be. Equally, it offers protection to employers who can rightfully say that the agreed rate is so much and they will not go beyond it. It provides a role and a benchmark that is clear and productive and adds to the marketplace in an open market economy an element of certainty that is necessary in terms of going forward three years.

I will not comment on the terms of the pay deal; that is for individual workers to vote upon in due course. I am talking about the process rather than the terms set out in the second section of the document.

I draw the Taoiseach's attention to a last minute "Jesus we forgot something, we'd better get it in quick" instance. The five objectives on page five are set out, with the last including deepening capabilities, achieving higher participation rates and more successfully handling diversity, including immigration. Those last two words are where someone said we have left something out and we must put it in. It screams at the reader. The contents do not mention a word of it except when it comes to work permits.

Ten years seems like a long time, but it is only as far back as 1996. Like yesterday or tomorrow, it is very close. If migration rates are maintained at current levels, 10% of the population of the Republic of Ireland — 400,000 people — will be foreign nationals. They are not just workers from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. They come with families and have children who present at national schools. They have cultural attitudes and linguistic problems of integrating in society.

The rest of the northern European experience is crying out to us in this respect. We should talk to our Danish and Dutch colleagues or to the Swedes who opened their borders to immigrants about the problems of cultural respect and integration at the same time. We have so many lessons to learn. The Netherlands, a tolerant, open society from the time of the reformation, took in Sephardic Jews expelled from Portugal and Spain and Protestants driven across the border from Catholic France and transformed the country. That open, tolerant, liberal society, which maintained that tradition until the 1990s, has now gone into reverse because of the convulsions it is experiencing in migration.

There is a free market neoliberal option of saying we need the workers, that we can forget about them once we no longer need them, and that we do not have to integrate them. The failure to integrate migrants into Dutch and Danish society, however, has transformed two open, tolerant countries into reactionary, conservative countries with a nasty tinge that none of us wants to see happen in this country. We will certainly not be Ireland of the welcomes for those people unless we are careful. We have no excuse because what we can see in the EU in a similar environment is what will happen here within ten years, only as far back as 1996. The increase of 400,000 people is the same as the populations of Cork, Limerick and Galway put together. This document does not deal with that.

Irish parents are now presenting their children for junior infants at overloaded primary schools where there are 36 children in the class, half of whom do not speak English as their first language. The parents are running to wherever they can to find another place for their children. We have a great national school system but no teacher can cope with that situation. On top of mainstreaming children with learning difficulties, schools must cope with children whose mother tongue is not English. We are overloading the system.

There is a gap between real thinking and aspiration in this document. The aspiration is to address the infrastructural deficit, as outlined on page 21. I agree with every word; there is still a significant infrastructural deficit. I have two cuttings from today's newspapers which demonstrate how we are not dealing with the infrastructural deficit in a strategic manner. The Macroom bypass and the Fermoy bypass are reported. The Taoiseach knows from his time in a local authority how long it takes to secure the paperwork, to hold public hearings and to make the compulsory purchase order for a bypass. This is nonsense. We should be looking at the road from Killarney to Rosslare with one hearing, one inquiry and one team.

Money is not the object. The Taoiseach already said this morning that there is a problem spending the capital budget. Part of the problem is that the Government is taking small bites when it should be swallowing loads. The Planning and Development (Strategic Infrastructure) Bill will not address this problem if the mentality in the National Roads Authority and the Government still focuses on bypasses. We would never have completed the gas pipeline from Cork to Dublin if we had used the bypass mentality. It was a single project with a single hearing, we took it in stages and it delivered. The Taoiseach knows that the construction work, which is now coming in ahead of time and under budget, is only a third of the timeframe for a project. Two thirds of the timeframe is taken up by planning, preparation and the legal process.

Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats are stuck in a bypass mentality. There is no great vision. The infrastructural deficit is on the Government benches. The capacity deficit is in the Government after nine years of unprecedented wealth. Not since the building of Leinster House was there such prosperity in Ireland, but this Government is incapable of getting expensive medical machines to work after 4 p.m. in the public sector and is still locked in a bypass mentality for infrastructure. Having said that, I want to see this document implemented and the Government that will replace the current Government next May will proceed to do it.

I endorse the Taoiseach's comments about the democratic deficit in social partnership. It is an open, participatory, inclusive process. When we return in the autumn, we should put in place a structured reporting mechanism where we take this document, if it is ratified, and divide it into sections for Oireachtas committees, establishing quarterly meetings with the relevant players from the social partners. During the Government that was formed in 1993-94, we tried to set up the NESF to address what we thought was a democratic deficit in the role of Oireachtas Members. We found that Oireachtas Members did not want to attend, however, and the level of participation was poor by all parties. Oireachtas Members want to be in the Chamber, not elsewhere. Therefore, we should bring in the social partners responsible for negotiating and implementing this agreement to our various committees in order to get a progress report and hold them to account in a manner that suits the culture and tradition of this House.

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