Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

His basic point was that there is another side to the argument other than competitiveness. I thought I made it clear earlier that of course there is another side. Workers understand that to keep the jobs of everybody they must be competitive but that does not mean they are not receiving gains. The social partnership process has delivered gains in return for productivity, competitiveness and more flexible working. Taxes, proportionally and in every other way, have decreased massively in terms of workers' wages over the years. This happened as a result of the negotiations. This is what happened in the early years and has continued. It also extended into the areas of lifestyle such as helping older people in the life cycle approach and helping younger people and helping with child care by way of significant investment.

Deputy Higgins referred to the affordable housing scheme as a total failure. The Government set out to expand social and affordable housing and the housing policy statement on sustaining communities and the national development plan reflected that commitment. The national development plan provided resources of some €18 billion in total to support increased output of social and affordable housing to help 140,000 households. Those things would not have happened outside of the context of social partnership. A significant programme of activity has been undertaken to assist house purchase under the national development programme — 40,000 households. State lands have been given for that. In addition, the national development plan resources will be used to meet the needs of 100,000 households through a range of social housing programmes. A total of 63,000 new social homes will commence or be acquired during the period of the plan.

Deputy Higgins referred to the pressures and that more may be required but enormous resources are being put into this area and record levels of funding for social and affordable housing are being provided this year. A total of €2.5 billion is available for housing programmes generally, and the Exchequer provision is €1.7 billion, which even in a difficult year, is 16% higher than last year. Similar resources are available for child care and resources for the aged.

I am in complete agreement with Deputy Higgins on his first point, that there is another side to the argument on competitiveness but I cannot agree with his second point. The achievement of social partnership is providing the resources to do things that would not otherwise have been possible if we had continued with the old style of adversarial human resource issues.

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