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

I thank the Deputies for their questions. When the programme for Government mentions building fair and inclusive prosperity, there are a number of things which the authors, including me, had in mind. The first was that we would get to a point where there would be employment for anybody who wants it, and we are quite close to that point now, with unemployment down to 4.4%. We are approaching full employment, which is a massive turnaround from eight or nine years ago and a significant improvement from three years ago. It was also very much about regional development. Three years ago one of the major criticisms of the recovery was that it was not reaching all parts of the country. While we can never have economic growth absolutely even in every part of the country, it is fair to say that in the past three years we have seen economic growth and increased prosperity spread throughout the country in a more balanced way than it was in the past. We can see that with unemployment going down and employment rising in each county, car sales and many other indicators. It was also about reducing poverty and deprivation. According to the Central Statistics Office, the independent body which examines these things, we have now had four years of the rate of poverty and deprivation falling, with child poverty down by about 30%. These were the kinds of things envisaged when we used the term of "fair and inclusive prosperity". There is of course more to be done and a journey yet to be travelled, which I acknowledge.

With regard to today's dispute in the health sector, I refer Deputies to what I said earlier but add that talks will now resume at the Workplace Relations Commission. I hope those talks will be conclusive in the coming days but if they are not, I still believe the Labour Court is the last port of call and should have been used before this strike happened in the first place.

It would be timely to update the carers' strategy now, given the passage of time and the fact that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has finally been ratified. I point to some of the significant progress that has been made to support carers better in recent years, including additional respite hours and houses; the full restoration of the carer support grant, which is not means-tested; the €15 per week increase in carer's benefit and carer's allowance; and the new 12 week rule that means somebody who has been a carer but is not a carer any more because the person being cared for passes on or moves into an institution, can continue to receive carer's allowance for three months to allow them the opportunity to get back to work or organise life. Free GP care has also been extended to all recipients of carer's allowance and carer's benefit, which is significant because carers have their own healthcare needs. That should not be forgotten.

It is not possible to do everything we would like to do in any one year but I believe those past three years have seen some real progress.

On orthodontics, it is fair to say that we all agree that the current system is not satisfactory. The new oral health policy points out a pathway by which we can adopt a different approach to oral health. That is entitled Smile Agus Sláinte, and I would encourage Deputies to familiarise themselves with that.

I note that Deputy Micheál Martin accuses me of being relentlessly negative. He does not usually accuse me of that. He usually accuses me of being too positive and not willing to accept that there are issues about which to be negative but perhaps I am getting a better balance than I had in the past.

In regard to housing and homelessness, as I mentioned earlier, there were just over 5,000 sustainable exits from homelessness into independent tenancies. That was a significant increase on 2017. Many more people are being lifted out of homelessness but, unfortunately, a roughly similar number are still becoming homeless every year. It is not possible to project when the numbers of people in emergency accommodation will fall because we cannot project accurately the number of different reasons people become homeless, and we know from research that they are manifold. It involves family breakdown-----

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