Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I would not dispute that. The facts nevertheless speak for themselves in respect of Deputy Quinn's term as Minister for Finance. Having said that, it is now a question of how to manage success. Nobody is more delighted than I am that we are now talking about managing success rather than about the dreadful period of the 1980s when we were managing failure. I will not waste time trying to say who was responsible for that failure. It is extraordinarily different to be talking about the problems of success.

One of my concerns is that there is in all our institutions, particularly our public service institutions, a reluctance to accept that what we are now doing is managing success. Many of the reference points and signposts that were used in the past to avoid the pitfalls of failure with which we were so familiar are getting in the way of a creative approach to success. In this regard, consider the extraordinary failure to deal with our transport infrastructure. The best we can hope for is that we will at least have the framework of a decent road infrastructure by 2009 or 2010, 13 years after the Government will have come into power. It will take nearly as long to have a decent rail infrastructure. We might have a decent urban public transport system by then if we are fortunate. However, we probably will not have proper telecommunications infrastructure because of the apparent inability to come to a single view on how to deal with it. As Senator Quinn, who is hardly an ideologue of the left, stated in the House on many occasions, we are falling rapidly behind.

What is repeatedly involved in this is our failure to acknowledge and manage success. We avoid the pitfalls that were a characteristic of failure but in the process we restrain our ability to institutionalise in bricks, mortar, roads, railways, public transport infrastructure and telecommunications infrastructure the success that has been achieved. The reason for this, as Senator Ross stated, is that while nobody disputes the capacity of the liberal market model to create wealth — Karl Marx had no problem accepting that — the liberal market model flops hopelessly in the way in which it pretends that the wealth created will be used.

The liberal market remains ideologically nailed to a view of the superior efficiency of individual private decisions over those of the community. This is due to an extraordinary ideological commitment to the concept of utility, which John Stuart Mill thought up over 200 years ago, and which no sane, modern psychologist or anthropologist would believe now. Unfortunately, economics has nailed itself to this mast of the individual maximising his or her utility. It has then managed to convince itself that as it is not possible to understand what each individual sees as his or her own utility, therefore, it is not possible to know or out-do the individual. This is close to witchcraft.

Someone once told me that the connection between economics and science is similar to the connection between astrology and astronomy. They use the same language but one is a science whereas the other is close to witchcraft. This need not apply to economics per se but to the belief in the idea of rational economic man, which is at the root of the belief in the liberal market model as a way to use the wealth created. The real job of a modern social democratic government is to manage the capacity to create wealth and to use the wealth created in the ways the market will always fail to do, not because there are, as the economists like to call them, market failures, but because the market not only will not but cannot do so. This is where the issues at the core of our national debate arise.

The first issue concerns the extraordinary inequality of income. Given international indices of income inequality, Ireland is more unequal than the United Kingdom. In the UK, 16% of all income is now — I will not say "earned"— paid to the top 1% of income earners. Therefore, I must assume that the percentage of national income that goes to the top 1% of income earners in this country is even higher. The exact figures are not available from the Revenue Commissioners because they do not break it down to the top 1% of income earners, so it is difficult to find the facts. However, I have outlined the position in Britain, which I will accept has got worse under Gordon Brown before the Minister of State reminds me.

At the other end of the income scale, we have had the introduction of the minimum wage, which I welcome and which was a progressive decision by the present Government and one I support. However, its introduction has been accompanied by a manifest increase in the number of working poor, which is where the debate arises about the present level of participation in our economy of workers from outside the State. One does not have to have much more than a rudimentary interest in economics to note that if perhaps 200,000 people come into an economy the size of Ireland, which has a labour force of approximately 2 million to 2.5 million depending on how it is measured, and are told they are free to work but that they will not receive any social assistance if they do not get a job, only one obvious conclusion can be arrived at by a rationalist economist, namely, that this will bid down wages at the bottom end of the economy. At best, it will ensure that the numbers working on minimum wage will increase. The fact that there has been a spectacular increase in the numbers at work in recent years without a spectacular increase in the amount of income tax revenue accruing to the State is a clear indicator of this.

An official of the Department of Finance was quoted during the most recent publication of Government figures as accepting that most new jobs were low wage jobs. If the view of the Government is that low wage jobs are the way to go, let it tell the people that — I do not want to go that way. I want an economy in which those at work feel rewarded and feel they are participating in the country's prosperity. Those stuck in minimum wage jobs do not feel they are participating in the success of the economy but that they are victims of its success and providers of services for the 80% who benefit.

This is where the issue concerning large scale immigrant labour arises and where the stories from around the country arise. It is why my party correctly stated that if we cannot create a regime in which decency is built into the institutions of employment, we will have to tell the employing class which, in our view, is beginning to use immigrant labour to undercut wages and working conditions, that it cannot have access to that supply of labour.

Who believes that 70,000 workers in the building industry are genuinely self-employed? I do not believe it and neither does anybody in the building sector trade unions, although others may. It is a scam to ensure employers avoid paying. We know there has been a significant increase in the numbers of people from outside the State working in the building industry.

With regard to the question of evidence, political parties, even one has big and successful as the Labour Party, have limited resources. It is the job of a state which is committed to the concept of fairness to find out if these practices are taking place and to prevent them. The extraordinarily slow, reluctant, glacial progress towards increasing the number of industrial inspectors — there are 31 inspectors — suggests that not only was the Government not prepared to do anything in this regard, but that it wanted as far as possible to avoid finding out about malpractice because, one can only conclude, it suspected it was taking place and believed it was good for the economy.

If there exists in the heart of Government a belief that cheap labour — I do not mean efficient, competitive labour — is a necessary part of our prosperity, that is where we disagree. I do not accept that it is necessary that 80% of workers have reasonable prosperity while 20% should be in menial, poorly paid, futureless employment.

This brings me to the other aspect of partnership, which is that, as Senator Ross keeps telling us, only 30% of the workforce are members of trade unions. That is an undisputable fact. What is not a fact is the conclusion drawn from this, namely, that the other 70% are not members of trade unions because they choose not to be. The Irish Times of 9 January last carried an article by a lecturer in industrial relations at University College, Dublin, which cited surveys carried out by ESRI and UCD and quoted figures, which I have not seen challenged, suggesting that two-thirds of those working in non-unionised employment claimed they would like to join a union if they were asked and if they did not think their employer would object. The clear implication is that they thought their employer would object. What is the meaning of partnership if approximately 40% of our workforce are in places of employment where the employers are hostile to the participation of workers in one of the pillars of social partnership? That contradicts partnership. I challenge the Government to change legislation on equal status and similar principles to make it illegal for an employer to discriminate through recruitment or promotion, or any other way against members of their staff who join trade unions. It should be a free choice and a neutral matter.

Imagine the horror that would ensue if ICTU said it would negotiate only with employers who were not members of IBEC, or with farmers who were not members of the IFA because it did not believe in collective negotiations. Why is it only workers against whom other partners in social partnership may discriminate if they join a trade union? According to this study, close to 70% of our workers would be in trade unions if they were not afraid of their employers.

The recently arrived new workers are in a culture which allows and encourages employers to discourage people from participating in social partnership. When an employer tells an employee that he or she disapproves of union membership this effectively means the employer does not want the employee to participate in social partnership. We are telling people that is okay. It is not okay.

That is why, yet again, I challenge the Government. It may be sanctimonious about my party leader's use of some phrases that perhaps would have been better not used but that should not distract it. Is the Government prepared to put together legal and institutional arrangements which will guarantee that everybody working in this State will have the same rights to money, holidays, pensions and security? Will it put the resources into such arrangements or will it be happy to be rated as a so-called "free economy"? It is unfortunate that Senator Mansergh, whom I know to be of the left, used this term, which boils down to an economy in which capital is free to behave as it wishes at the expense of everybody else.