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

On the last question Deputy Martin asked, there is a tracker on the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform's website which tracks all the projects, the timelines, when they are happening, which ones are running ahead of schedule and which ones are running behind and are not. The Deputy made a valid point in that construction inflation will not just affect the national children's hospital and will, of course, affect other projects. As it happens, road projects and water projects are all coming in on budget or even below budget. I am not entirely sure about the schools projects but I believe they are fairly okay. Road and water are okay. It would be wrong to assume that the national children's hospital is going to be the only project where construction inflation is an issue as it may well be an issue for other projects. There is provision for a review of Project Ireland 2040, and the mid-term review also. It may well be the case that we have to make adjustments over the course of it, and that was always intended.

I note Deputies mentioned the TASC report, and I will come to that in a second, but the most important survey released today was one produced by the CSO, which is an independent body and not a think-tank. The labour force survey was out today. The good news is that 2.3 million people were in work in Ireland at the end of 2018, which is a record high. Unemployment is down to 128,000 people, which is a ten year low. More than 1,000 new jobs were created every week, the vast majority of which were full-time. Deputies may be interested to know that it also showed that the number of people who are self-employed had actually fallen last year. The narrative we often hear from the Opposition is that there is a drift towards self-employment and that all the new jobs are part-time jobs, but the opposite is actually the case.

Almost all of the new jobs are full time and the numbers in self-employment are actually going down in raw numbers and percentage terms of the full workforce. It proves the inaccuracy of the claims made throughout the course of last year by some elements of the Opposition. The biggest increases which should not surprise people are in services and construction.

In terms of the TASC report, I had an opportunity, not to read it yet, but to listen to one of its authors speak on radio and to skim over it earlier today. It confirms that the levels of poverty and deprivation in Ireland are falling and have been for several years, that income inequality in Ireland is about average and less than in most English speaking countries and about average when one compares-----

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