Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I thank the Minister of State for outlining the position. It gives me great pleasure to discuss this issue. I strongly support the points made earlier by Senator Mansergh about the effort that goes into the production of such a report. I ask the Minister to convey my thanks to the teams of civil servants who worked day and night and at weekends over a long period, and have done so for the past 16 years each time it was necessary. I mention in particular the three lead Departments of the Taoiseach, Finance, and Enterprise, Trade and Employment which were involved. The team co-ordinated by the Secretary General of the Taoiseach's Department, Dermot McCarthy, was superb.

I will break with precedent and say that the Minister's adviser here today, Ciaran Connolly, had a huge input into the work in terms of modernisation and flexibility. Mr. Connolly and his team would give anybody watching their operation a great sense of confidence in the Civil Service and the way it goes about its work. It is important to say that because we often argue with them. Indeed, I often banged the table across from these people but, whatever differences I had with them, I never questioned their commitment in terms of what they are trying to achieve.

From the narrow point of view of trade unions, and I will speak more broadly later in my contribution, I agree with many of the points made by Senator Higgins on the importance of making partnership work and keeping a check on it afterwards to ensure it delivers. The advances made in the area of minimum pay, redundancy payments and union recognition are the most significant in quantitative terms ever made in those areas. In the redundancy area it has been the greatest advance since the scheme was established. In the area of union recognition, we did not get what we were looking for but we made significant advances on those made previously.