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

We have a gender pay gap in Ireland. There are many reasons for it, two of which I cited. I said that women do not get a fair go. They do not get a fair crack of the whip when it comes to promotion in the workplaces because women are very often unfairly expected to carry a greater burden of child care then men. I do not think there is anything wrong about that. I think both those things are very true. That is what I said, so if Deputy McDonald wants to check the record, she can do so. Those things need to change. We need to see more women being promoted in the workplace, be it in the public or private sector, because women do not get a fair go when it comes to promotion.

I am conscious that every couple is different but we need to see men taking on their fair share of caring and child rearing. We can do that through things like extending paternity leave, which we have introduced, much better family leave, and more family-friendly workplaces. Far from being passive, this Government is being active. We are the Government that is bringing in gender pay gap legislation. It could have been done by any previous Government. We are the ones who are doing it. That will require initially companies with 250 employees, reducing to 50 later, to publish their gender pay gap. That will bring about transparency. Companies will be asked to explain why they have a gender pay gap and why their gender pay gap is bigger than that of their competitors. That is an example of where we are being very active and are certainly not being passive.

Last year, for the first time ever, 52% of appointments to State boards by the Government were female. We want to get to the point where we have equal representation, from 40-60 to 50-50, but for the first time in a very long time, if not ever, 52% of people appointed to State boards were women and that is because of a major effort to promote that as a policy with hard targets. We will now introduce a new initiative around company boards similar to a measure introduced in the UK, a Government-led initiative to put pressure on private sector companies to put more women on their boards. Interview panels are developed from boards. Therefore, there will be more women on interview panels and, therefore, women will be more likely to get a fair chance of being promoted. This is an issue on which the Government is very committed to acting and where it is doing things no previous Government did and could have done.

In respect of community banking, the Government is considering the Sparkassen proposal. What might not come across a lot of the time is the fact that Sparkassen's request is that the Government would put €150 million or more into this. It is one thing if a bank wants to set up in Ireland, and we welcome competition and want more banks to set up in Ireland and give more credit, but it is another thing when the bank is asking the Government to pay for the setting up and to capitalise it. That is a definite difficulty we have. We must also bear in mind that we have some forms of community banking such as credit unions which provide all sorts of community banking and can probably do more. We would like to see An Post provide banking services more. For the Government to stump up the money for an institution to come in and do it is a very different question. This point has been missed in the debate.

The HSE service plan must be approved by the Minister for Health. It generally goes to Cabinet as well. There is a debate over the costings. It is the job of the Department of Health to second-guess costings of financial projections put forward by the HSE. It is the job of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to do the same, to examine any costings and projections Departments or agencies come up with and second-guess them. That happens and should happen.

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