Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I suppose I should thank the Taoiseach for his rather patronising remarks to myself and Deputy McDonald in respect of young people being unemployed. I do not care whether the figure of 750 young people being unemployed in Dublin West is by his calculation really only 5% - the statisticians in the CSO say it is 11% or 12%.

On the gender pay gap, I will have to read back over the Taoiseach's reply. Yesterday, his Minister for Finance told me that the seven top jobs in the Department of Finance are all held by men. That sounds to me as though, for the women in the Department of Finance who are bright, capable and ambitious, a penalty is being exacted for having children and families. It is not that they do not want to be promoted, as the Taoiseach is patronisingly suggesting to women, but that we have not amended the position in respect of women who, over a 40-year career, take three or six years off work because they have a number of children. What is unusual about women taking time off in such circumstances? That is what we need to change. I have said before that I was one of four women around a table of 18 men in the Cabinet. The Taoiseach has actually reduced that number since he came into office. I am not sure he gets gender equality. The reason for the pay gap is that women are concentrated in the lower echelons of the public service. When it comes to the Department of Finance, the budget, the rainy day fund and so on, nobody at the top level is a woman.

In the context of the social economy, we have been awaiting a report on social and community based banking from the Government for some time. The main banks are closing their branches, particularly in rural Ireland and disadvantaged urban communities, and the post offices are planning to do the same. There is a proposal for community based banking with perhaps a pilot scheme from Sparkasse, the German community bank that has been operating for a long time. It has offered to run a pilot scheme in Ireland to show how a new form of community banking that would include home loans would operate. I am told the Department of Finance - with no women at the helm, by the way - is actually set once again to give this the thumbs down. Is this real in terms of the crisis we have heard about this morning in different parts of rural Ireland? There is also a crisis in a significant number of disadvantaged communities that still have high unemployment.

See this speech in context