Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Killeen, and am grateful for the opportunity to debate the issue of social partnership. This debate is perfectly timed although in previous years, the issue was not debated in this House until it was too late. As has been said many times in this House, decisions have been made in the past without advice and input from both Houses of the Oireachtas.

I want to focus mainly on the non-pay element of the current negotiations, but first I wish to make one or two points about pay. It goes without saying that the vital consideration with regard to pay is competitiveness, particularly international competitiveness. That point has been made many times but I am not sure people are really paying it sufficient attention. Over the past five years or more we have been steadily chipping away at our competitiveness, with the result that we are now much less competitive than we once were. We will not really feel the impact of this slide down the slippery slope until it is too late. One day soon we will wake up and discover that we have priced ourselves out of the market, particularly the markets in which we want to compete. We will discover that it no longer makes sense for multinational firms to invest in this country because the returns simply do not add up. My fear is that by the time this really hits us, it will be far too late to do anything about it. The time to realise the danger, and to take whatever corrective action is required, is now. That is why any pay agreement that further undermines our competitiveness would sow the seeds for future disaster.

The only other point I want to make about pay is that we should all recognise the difficulties arising from public sector pay. Public sector pay levels, particularly when one takes into account pension benefits, are now way ahead of pay levels in the private sector. The "Marian Finucane" radio programme last weekend featured an interview with the chief executive of one of the larger pensions companies, who claimed that pensions in the public sector add approximately 45% to workers' salaries, when compared with private sector workers with no pensions. We have not taken into account the enormous impact of the pension schemes in the public sector, particularly the benchmark linked schemes. As a result, we now have private sector unions, like the banks officials association, clamouring for an adjustment that will close the gap between the public and private sectors. However, if we go down that route, we can throw any pretence at staying competitive out the window. The only sensible way forward is for private sector pay to be related to competitive considerations and for public sector pay to be approached on the basis of comparability with what is paid in the private sector. What we need is a kind of benchmarking in reverse.

The big lie about the benchmarking process was that there was a gap between private sector pay and public sector pay. We now know that gap simply did not exist and that, as a result of benchmarking, a gap has been opened up in the opposite direction. If we try to close that gap by increasing private sector pay to match that in the public sector, we are setting out on the road to disaster. We must address the situation from a realistic standpoint, recognising that public sector pay is already too high.

Vital as it is that we get the pay elements of these negotiations right, the non-pay elements of social partnership are of even greater importance. We should use the new agreement to firmly commit the Government to making a raft of necessary, long-term investments and to convince the general public to support the spending of resources on those investments. There are three investments in particular that I have in mind, the first of which would aim to eradicate educational disadvantage. I have spoken on this issue a number of times in this House and am well aware that the Minister for Education and Science has new plans in this area, which I welcome, but with one reservation. Ambitious as her plans are, they do not go far enough to address the problem and as such, they run the risk that the investment will fail for being too timid. As I have said before, solving educational disadvantage will take an enormous amount of money and it will involve effort by far more players than just the Department of Education and Science. Disadvantage is not purely an educational problem, it is also a social problem and we must tackle it in an holistic way.

I hope the social partnership process will embrace the reality that we will never solve educational disadvantage by playing around at the edges of the problem, we must attack it head-on, with all the resources the problem demands. If the social partners recognise this reality and act on it, this agreement would represent a major step forward in the development of our country. I cannot stress that point strongly enough. I have some experience of the education area and I was astounded how the same people are left behind all the time. Even if we solve the other problems, those who are educationally disadvantaged do not get the benefits and stay at the bottom of the pile.

The second area of investment is in the integration of immigrants. It is an incredible fact, which emerged recently in the Joint Committee on European Affairs, that no agency of Government is responsible for ensuring that our new immigrants are integrated in our society. This is another time-bomb. If we do not encourage immigrants to integrate, we are laying the seeds for the kind of trouble that happened in France in recent months. We should take what happened there as a grim warning of the consequences we will certainly suffer if we refuse to address this issue while we still have time. I employ a number of immigrants and it was a joy to see them succeeding, growing and blossoming, integrating with others, as their language became ours and they were able to mix, benefiting our country. There were others, however, at the bottom of the pile doing the washing and cleaning, who tended not to learn our language. They would go home to a ghetto-type environment, where they would meet only their own people and would not learn our language or integrate. When we ask what Government agency is responsible for addressing this, it turns out there is none.

The third area where we must invest in is preparing the country for the information society. I wrote an article in The Irish Times last week drawing attention to the mismatch between our declared ambitions in this area and our performance on the ground. We have made the right diagnosis, that the information society is the world of the future. We have declared the right ambition, that Ireland, if we play our cards right, can not only do well in that new society but can take on a leadership position. Despite making the right diagnosis and formulating the right ambition, however, we have done nothing to act on what we know and what we have decided. This is madness.

I hope the social partnership process is a rallying ground on which the country can dedicate itself to doing what is necessary to succeed in the information society. If we do not do that, we will discover that we have missed out on what will very soon be the only show in town. We have seen other countries, particularly places like Singapore, make a success of it. We can do the same but it requires Government commitment and action now.