Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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5. To ask the Taoiseach if he will report on the European Council meeting of Heads of State and Government in Gothenburg, Sweden on 17 November 2017. [49175/17]

Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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7. To ask the Taoiseach if he will report on the EU social summit in Gothenburg; and the issues that were discussed. [49849/17]

Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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8. To ask the Taoiseach if he held bilaterals at the EU summit on social rights in Gothenburg; and the issues that were discussed. [49850/17]

Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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9. To ask the Taoiseach if he has had engagement with the Prime Minister of Poland, Ms Beata Szydło, recently. [50150/17]

Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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10. To ask the Taoiseach if he will report on the informal meeting of European Union Heads of State and Government held on 17 November 2017. [50152/17]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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11. To ask the Taoiseach if he will report on his attendance at the EU social summit in Gothenburg in November 2017. [50201/17]

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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12. To ask the Taoiseach if he will report on his visit to Gothenburg. [50597/17]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 5 and 7 to 12, inclusive, together.

I attended the social summit for fair jobs and growth in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 17 November, with the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Affairs, Deputy Doherty, and the Minister of State with responsibility for European affairs, Deputy McEntee. This was organised jointly by Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, and European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker.

The social summit gathered EU leaders, social partners and other stakeholders for an open discussion on how to promote fair jobs and growth. The focus was on learning from each other's national experiences, particularly in making the most of new opportunities, and tackling common challenges for the labour markets and welfare models of today and tomorrow.

During the summit, the inter-institutional proclamation on the European pillar of social rights was signed by the Presidents of the Council, Parliament and Commission. This represents important reinforcement of political commitment by the member states and the EU institutions to supporting key social policy objectives at both national and EU levels.

The social summit was followed by a working lunch for leaders, chaired by the European Council President, Donald Tusk. This was the first in a series of discussions under his leaders' agenda, as endorsed by the European Council in October, and it focused on education and culture. While the EU has limited competence in these areas, we had constructive exchanges on how we could do more, including on initiatives such as a stronger Erasmus programme. I expect that the outcome of both the social summit and our leaders' agenda discussion will be reflected in the conclusions we adopt at the forthcoming December European Council.

I also had a meeting with the Prime Minister May in Gothenburg and reported to the House on 22 November all about this meeting. I did not have any formal meetings with other Heads of State and Government while in Gothenburg. However, I did take the opportunity, as is customary at these events, to speak with many of them on many issues in the margins of the summit and during the meals.

I have not yet had the opportunity for a formal meeting with Polish Prime Minister Szydlo. However, I did speak to her in Gothenburg, in June and October at the European Councils, and at September’s digital summit in Tallinn. We sat beside each other for one of the meals.

Ongoing political engagement with our EU and international partners remains crucial, especially as negotiations on Brexit proceed, and I will continue to take advantage of every opportunity to advance Ireland's interests with my fellow members of the European Council.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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I call Deputy Ryan.

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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No, afterwards.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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The Deputy passes.

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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I am glad the Taoiseach attended Gothenburg because, hopefully, this is a return to an EU which will develop a serious antipoverty programme not just for Ireland, but for the whole of the EU and particularly for countries such as Greece, which have not been able to exit their problems. I want to ask the Taoiseach about two issues. When I was Minister for Social Protection, there was a lot of work done at an incredibly slow pace on a European social pillar, in other words, and this is what Gothenburg was partly about, a strong social security system in each country. It would be a Europe of strong social security systems in each country that would help people and provide a cushion of safety.

Most importantly, we will not get people out of poverty and into a reasonably comfortable standard of living unless we address wages. Does the Taoiseach agree with some of the thinking about Gothenburg, that we need to maintain wage levels in the European Union as an absolute primary, and to maintain wage levels? This is something I know Fine Gael does not like, but we must return to social partnership and have national agreements that actually help those people at the bottom of the wage scale, including people who are bogusly self-employed.

Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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The European social pillar document and strategy launched at the summit sets out a series of principles of social policy, which are accepted by member states. It has no justiciable basis, of course, but it is intended as a means of setting broad objectives for national and European Union activity.

It is a very worthy document but it is not clear what importance is attached to it. It is a pity the Government did not publish a national position on that document beforehand, which we could have debated in the House. There is a failure when we develop inflated rhetoric about social policy which is not followed up by action because of basic issues such as the European Union budget and widely differing social support systems. I recall plenty of rhetoric around social guarantees and the Youth Guarantee but it was just rhetoric, with little funding to support it. Can the Taoiseach detail what specific actions he is undertaking following the signing of the European Pillar of Social Rights?

The document mentions individual access to housing and the Taoiseach will note that, despite the attempt to relativise homelessness figures at the Fine Gael conference, the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government has admitted the problem will get worse. I have heard that phrase previously. When the Taoiseach was appointed Minister for Health one of his first pronouncements was that the situation would get worse and, by God, it did get worse. I got very worried, therefore, when the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government said at the Fine Gael conference that the situation would get worse. How worse will it get before it will improve? Has the Taoiseach any idea of what his Minister was commenting on?

Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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The Taoiseach noted the importance of continued contacts with our European partners on Brexit. The media today are reporting that the British have agreed to pay between €45 billion and €55 billion in its settlement of the divorce bill. That will obviously increase demands by the British that the European Union meeting two weeks hence will accept this as substantial progress and move to negotiations on a new trade deal. That means there will be a focus on what progress has been made on two outstanding issues of the current negotiations, the Border and the status of EU citizens in the North. So far, there has been no detailed plan from the British for how they intend to resolve these matters. The Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Coveney, have been insisting, quite rightly, that no progress can be made to advance to the trade talks without real guarantees and commitments from the British on the Border.

I acknowledge that it is better to resolve all these issues diplomatically, but we are now coming to a critical point in the negotiations. The Taoiseach has a veto. Is he prepared to use it? I appeal to him to be resolved to do so. The right of citizens in the North to EU citizenship is a fundamental part of this. I appeal to the Taoiseach to ensure there is progress on both of these issues and that this be the Government's red line in the forthcoming negotiations.

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The Taoiseach will agree there has been a great deal of strain on the European project in recent years, with increased nationalism and an increased number of votes for nationalist and anti-EU parties across the European Union. He will probably agree that much of that is predicated on the loss of faith in the European project as a social project that impacts positively on the people of Europe and not simply an international trade agreement, as it is sometimes characterised particularly by some commentators in the United Kingdom. Will the Taoiseach acknowledge that signing the European Pillar of Social Rights is a fundamental and important readjustment? On a number of occasions I raised the fact that in the negotiations preceding this agreement Ireland sought to water it down. That was not an auspicious or desirable stand for the country to take. However, now that it has been signed it is important, and Deputy Martin made this point, to have an Irish implementation plan. Is it the Taoiseach's view that we must reconnect with people to ensure that the vision of Europe is a social Europe that incorporates rights for working people and standards of decency? Will we have an implementation plan on issues such as zero-hour and if-and-when contracts and other important matters such as housing and so forth? Will the Taoiseach undertake to produce such a national implementation plan?

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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If I was going to a summit on social issues in Europe I would certainly make the point, and I hope the Taoiseach did this, that the biggest social crisis facing this country is housing and homelessness and that it is at appalling emergency levels. A little known fact, but one noted by Mercy Law Resource Centre among others, is that, incredibly, Ireland opted out of the right to housing provisions of the European Social Charter, even though it was used to sell the Lisbon treaty to us. I presume it was Fianna Fáil that made this decision, which shows its commitment to social housing even then. Should we not opt into the provision on the right to housing in the European Social Charter?

Second, to what extent does the Taoiseach think that EU state aid and competition rules are causing us a problem in delivering the social and public housing we need? Certainly in my local authority area, and I presume this happens everywhere else, the tendering processes that require us most of the time to outsource work on public housing are one of the major areas of bureaucracy and delay preventing us from delivering the public housing that is required.

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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There was a wide range of questions, a number of which are tangential to the questions that were tabled. However, as always, I will try my best to answer as many questions as possible.

I was pleased to represent the Government at Gothenburg for the social summit. As I mentioned in my video piece at the end of the summit with the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Deputy Regina Doherty, and the Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach, Deputy McEntee, it was an opportunity for us to reignite the engine of social Europe. There is a sense across Europe, not just among politicians but particularly among citizens, that in the last decade Europe has focused so much on banking, deficits, fiscal matters, finance and trade it has been to the detriment of everything else. Europe has never just been an economic community or a free trade area. It has always been about more than that. Many of the labour and social rights we have in Ireland flow from European law, whether it is equal pay for equal work or the fact that child benefit was moved from being paid to the father to being paid to the mother. It all happened as a consequence of progressive European legislation.

The vision set out in the paper is very much one that was shared by the Christian democrats and social democrats who established the European project in the first place. That vision was of a social market economy, the belief that market economies are the best ways to produce wealth and employment for people while also recognising the role of government in ensuring social progress by using the market economy and harnessing its wealth and job producing effects to bring about social good. The original speeches of the famous men and women who founded the European Economic Community spoke a great deal about the social market economy. It is a political philosophy that my party very much supports.

We are very supportive of the declaration. While we had some reservations along the way we were happy to sign it. Of course, it is not legally binding but it will guide future European regulations and directives in areas such as labour rights, social protection and pension rights. One of the points I made was that it had to work in terms of portability. The world of work is changing all the time. Most people entering the workforce now will probably have a number of different employers, will be self-employed for periods of their life and employees for other periods and they will probably travel a great deal. They will work in more than one country. However, our social welfare systems are not set up to reflect that properly. This gives us an opportunity to develop more European law in these areas.

It is interesting and fascinating, however, to see the different approaches that countries adopt to it.

A number of people in this House would see the Nordic countries and their flexicurity model as being one of the better and more developed labour markets and social market economies, but the Nordic countries are among the most sceptical when it comes to further EU harmonisation in this area because they feel harmonisation and making things the same across Europe could harmonise things downwards. They are among the countries that are most sceptical about the European Pillar of Social Rights for that reason. It is fascinating to see the different perspectives people have.

We discussed the possibility of a European minimum wage. I spoke very much in favour of a European minimum wage but, of course, that would be on the basis that there would then be a national top up to take account of the different costs of living in different European countries.

In terms of social partnership, I am very pleased that the Government was able to negotiate a very good public sector pay deal with the public sector unions. Legislation for that is now going through the House and will bring about pay restoration and pay increases in some cases throughout next year and through to 2020. When it comes to social partnership with the private sector, both IBEC and ICTU take the view that they do not want to go down that road and that the existing bargaining mechanisms are working for them and their members, but it is not something we would rule out in the future if we needed to achieve price stability among other things.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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We will now move on to Question No. 13.

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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Question No. 4.

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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And Question No. 6.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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We will be including those.