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

I take some of the points made by Deputy Moynihan in his contribution. I am not sure that I fully understood the question. If the Deputy wants to come back with a supplementary question I would be happy to try to answer it again, once I understand the question.

With regard to Deputy Boyd Barrett's comments, I acknowledge the shortcomings, challenges and failures that exist in our public services in Ireland. On listening to Deputy Barrett again and again, one would think that we lived in the worst country in the world and that Ireland was some sort of wasteland, and that it was an awful place to live and be a citizen. Yet, this is a country that the UN human development index ranks fourth in the world. That is not a measure of GDP. It is not a measure of the size of our economy. This index takes into account health, education, life expectancy and the quality of our public services. The UN human development index ranks Ireland as fourth in the world, which is up from tenth or eleventh place not that long ago. If a small UN committee made a criticism of Ireland, Deputy Boyd Barrett would be the first on his feet to tell us how awful we are, but when the UN Development Programme, with its well respected human development index, ranks us fourth in the world, the Deputy does not want to acknowledge that. Ireland is rising, for example, when it comes to the social progress index, and it has been for a number of years. The Deputy does not want to acknowledge that. When we consider the Central Statistics Office statistics, the survey of income and living conditions shows that poverty and deprivation is falling in Ireland, that income inequality is narrowing, and that inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient is narrowing. Again, the Deputy does not want to acknowledge any of that. The Deputy also does not want to acknowledge the fact that employment levels in Ireland are at their highest. It seems to me that there is very much a double standard here. The Deputy wants to come in, use every example of anything that is wrong in the country but he never acknowledges the progress that we are making in the country, and he never acknowledges the fact that when taken in the round Ireland is a good country, it is a good place to live and we offer our citizens a lot of opportunities. Yes, we can do better, but if one wants to do better one starts by acknowledging what is going well and then try to fix the things that are wrong. One does not just rubbish everything and everyone and everything they do. That is a defeatist and nihilistic attitude and it will not bring about any positive change for any citizens in our country.

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