Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank everyone for the work that has been done on this and the sustainable development goals, including those on the committee and all the people who attended. The Cathaoirleach has done excellent work over the past year. It has been a really useful exercise and shows what we can do when we look at the recommendations. I will go through some of them briefly to highlight a few issues and Deputy O'Rourke is also going to go through some of them.

In recommendation 2 in particular the committee “recommends that particular focus be given to the area of Lifelong Learning in order to increase participation rates”. As somebody who left school at age 15, one of the lessons I learned later on is we are always learning, every day is a school day and every day we learn something new. It is really important to get the message across to everyone in our communities that there are pathways through education right the way through our entire lives. There are some disadvantaged communities, like the Traveller community and new communities of people who have come into the country recently. There is obviously an issue around lifelong learning, but access to education is something that is incredibly important. It is one of the goals we should be really focused on because education is the way out of poverty. It is certainly one of the most important things.

Recommendation 4 is to “address skills deficits that persist among certain groups, older people and those with lower educational attainment ...”. Again it is looking at the skills audit. Maybe the Minister of State could take this one up. We have had thousands of people come in over the last number of years looking for international protection and asylum. I am not sure whether this is true, but I heard the other day there is no skills audit of people who come in. There is no analysis of what skills they have with respect to what they can contribute to the system. It is something that could be really important if it were addressed. I was listening to a programme on RTÉ the other night and a representative talked about Cahersiveen. He talked about there being a population of 500 Ukrainians there. As we know, there is huge shortage of GPs in pretty much every community, but there were doctors who came in from Ukraine. It is about that addition, looking at the skills and how we can support people to utilise the skills they have to benefit the communities they are moving into to enhance them.

Recommendation 7 is for “continued investment in remote working facilities in rural areas and on the islands” in particular. We had a recent visit to Arranmore, which was superb. I think it was the first online committee on the islands that was broadcast live. It was a really good experience. Again, one of the interesting statistics was that there were two people working on the islands remotely and that has gone up now through the remote hub to 27 or 29. That is really good. It enhances the community, it keeps people on the islands and it encourages them to build a life there.

Recommendation 9 deals with a big bugbear of mine with the circular economy. I will address the first part, which is the waste streams. Something we really need to look at when talking about the circular economy and waste streams is that we do not start when the consumer buys the product and finish when the consumer finishes paying to recycle the product. We need to get in much earlier so when companies are producing these products there is an onus on them to reduce the amount of waste. I spoke to a number of shops over the last while and people talked about the waste packaging that comes with a product when it comes from the factory via the van or truck to the shop. Vast amounts of waste are created trying to patch this up and then shops have to get rid of that waste. That is paid for by the consumer. When we are talking about the circular economy we have to move much further back with that.

It is when the product is being produced in the factory that there needs to be a lot more thought about the amount of packaging that goes into the production, from the very beginning to the very end, in order that it is not left to the consumers ourselves to pick up the slack in that regard.

Recommendation 12 regarding social welfare rates was, I think, noted by Deputy Ó Cathasaigh. One of Sinn Féin's recommendations in this regard is the establishment of a social welfare adequacy commission which would advise the Government on social protection payment rates. The commission would make recommendations on payment rates ahead of the annual budget, with the aim of ensuring they are adequate, meet a minimal essential standard of living and protect people from poverty. This would ensure that all recipients are protected from poverty. It is important to note that these rates can fluctuate upwards or downwards depending on inflation and the success of any government in providing access to affordable or free healthcare, housing and childcare. It is important to note, in the context of social welfare rates, that many people are living below the poverty line. Nobody should be living below the poverty line in one of the wealthiest countries in Europe. We need to do an awful lot of work on that. Social Justice Ireland produces a really interesting booklet every year in that regard and on the impacts of poverty. We see them in our communities and deal with them in our constituency offices all the time.

Recommendation 15 is "that the Connecting Ireland policy is accelerated in order to tackle the issue of transportation deprivation among people living in rural areas". It is not just rural areas; in some urban areas there is a huge deficit of public transport and access to it. One particular area in my constituency is Hollystown and beyond, into the rural hinterland. There is very little public transport there. There are significant rural parts of Dublin. That needs to be taken into account as well.

Lastly, I wish to address the issue of hot meals as an effective anti-poverty measure. I have personal experience of this. When I started work in 2001 on the early school leaver initiative, a precursor to the school completion programme, there was a grant of €20,000 given by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in the Coolock-Darndale area for the provision of breakfasts for children. That was one of the very first programmes to address access to food for people in disadvantaged areas. Now there has been the expansion of it to hot meals during the day, the breakfast clubs and the after-school clubs. It is really important and has really added to the educational attainment of children, encouraging young people to get into school. As we know, not everybody has access to a hot meal during the day. The universality of it is also really important. Over the nearly 20 years I was there, we always looked at young students who were supported but who needed that extra support. They were on our 100 support list. We also always included students who were not on our support lists because we do not want to isolate students or have them as targeted students. They all need to be supported. That is really important.

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