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

There was a wide range of questions, a number of which are tangential to the questions that were tabled. However, as always, I will try my best to answer as many questions as possible.

I was pleased to represent the Government at Gothenburg for the social summit. As I mentioned in my video piece at the end of the summit with the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Deputy Regina Doherty, and the Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach, Deputy McEntee, it was an opportunity for us to reignite the engine of social Europe. There is a sense across Europe, not just among politicians but particularly among citizens, that in the last decade Europe has focused so much on banking, deficits, fiscal matters, finance and trade it has been to the detriment of everything else. Europe has never just been an economic community or a free trade area. It has always been about more than that. Many of the labour and social rights we have in Ireland flow from European law, whether it is equal pay for equal work or the fact that child benefit was moved from being paid to the father to being paid to the mother. It all happened as a consequence of progressive European legislation.

The vision set out in the paper is very much one that was shared by the Christian democrats and social democrats who established the European project in the first place. That vision was of a social market economy, the belief that market economies are the best ways to produce wealth and employment for people while also recognising the role of government in ensuring social progress by using the market economy and harnessing its wealth and job producing effects to bring about social good. The original speeches of the famous men and women who founded the European Economic Community spoke a great deal about the social market economy. It is a political philosophy that my party very much supports.

We are very supportive of the declaration. While we had some reservations along the way we were happy to sign it. Of course, it is not legally binding but it will guide future European regulations and directives in areas such as labour rights, social protection and pension rights. One of the points I made was that it had to work in terms of portability. The world of work is changing all the time. Most people entering the workforce now will probably have a number of different employers, will be self-employed for periods of their life and employees for other periods and they will probably travel a great deal. They will work in more than one country. However, our social welfare systems are not set up to reflect that properly. This gives us an opportunity to develop more European law in these areas.

It is interesting and fascinating, however, to see the different approaches that countries adopt to it.

A number of people in this House would see the Nordic countries and their flexicurity model as being one of the better and more developed labour markets and social market economies, but the Nordic countries are among the most sceptical when it comes to further EU harmonisation in this area because they feel harmonisation and making things the same across Europe could harmonise things downwards. They are among the countries that are most sceptical about the European Pillar of Social Rights for that reason. It is fascinating to see the different perspectives people have.

We discussed the possibility of a European minimum wage. I spoke very much in favour of a European minimum wage but, of course, that would be on the basis that there would then be a national top up to take account of the different costs of living in different European countries.

In terms of social partnership, I am very pleased that the Government was able to negotiate a very good public sector pay deal with the public sector unions. Legislation for that is now going through the House and will bring about pay restoration and pay increases in some cases throughout next year and through to 2020. When it comes to social partnership with the private sector, both IBEC and ICTU take the view that they do not want to go down that road and that the existing bargaining mechanisms are working for them and their members, but it is not something we would rule out in the future if we needed to achieve price stability among other things.

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