Derek McDowell (Labour)

I second the amendment in the name of the Fine Gael and Labour Party Senators. My party supports the social partnership process and much of the content of the current agreement. However, without in any way being smart, if one reads through and considers the agreement, as I have done today, there is very little with which any sane person might reasonably disagree, even the tired old voices to which the Leader referred.

In our amendment we seek to address some of the structural problems becoming increasingly evident in the process. I want to be rather more direct than usual in addressing some of them at the beginning of what I have to say. There is a problem with what some of the parties bring to the table, particularly with the current agreement. There is a problem with the Government parties and some of the individual social partners. The Government comes to it with six months of its mandate left to run. It purports to set out an agreement that runs for ten years, until 2016. In a sense, that is not terribly problematic, since much of its content is general and, frankly, gobbledegook.

However, the Government purports to commit not only itself but several successors to an agreement that encompasses a very wide range of policy areas. This in itself points up a serious democratic problem. I appear to be losing my audience more quickly than I had anticipated. I thought we might fit my contribution in between two World Cup matches but I am not doing too well in this regard.

The fact that the Government seeks to commit not just itself but also several of its successors to certain courses of action presents a genuine difficulty. We have had experience of this in the past. When Charlie McCreevy visited this House after his appointment as Minister for Finance, he stated that he had no intention of adhering to the previous agreement's provisions regarding tax reductions. However, this Government is seeking to do this in a far more ambitious way than any of its predecessors. It has six months to run but it is looking to bind Governments for the next ten years. I do not think it can realistically seek to do this.

There is also a problem with what the social partners bring to the table. I accept that this is possibly a more sensitive area. When people look to the leaders of the trade unions to which they belong, and I say this as a member of a trade union, they look for leadership and delivery on a range of issues. These issues primarily relate to the workplace. They chiefly concern pay but also encompass issues such as conditions of employment. The new agreement contains many sensible proposals in respect of these issues.

However, a problem arises when one goes beyond these issues. When trade union leaders look to negotiate on a range of issues ranging from early learning to child care to overseas development aid, they venture into areas where their members have not given, and do not feel they should be asked to give, the trade union leadership a mandate to negotiate on their behalf. If I was leader of a trade union, I would consider it perfectly reasonable to state that agreements with the Government of a corporatist nature should not simply be confined to the workplace and that there is far more which defines the standard of living of my members. I would insist on this if I was a trade union leader. However, if we are to be objective, we must state that trade union members do not appoint their leaders to negotiate on their behalf on certain issues.

It is important to remember this because if there is a failure to deliver on these aspects of the agreement, which often happens, it lies beyond the competence of the trade union leadership in many cases to make it stick. We have seen examples of this from previous agreements, including the current one. Trade union leaders cannot realistically return to their members and tell them that the housing conditions of the agreement are not being met and that the union should agitate as a result because most trade union members do not know that they agreed to this in the first place.

A similar problem also arises with employers and the voluntary sector. Much of what they do is good and I disagree with virtually none of it but nobody appointed the leaders of these sectors to agree to these measures which makes their position much more difficult when they are looking to hold the Government to account in terms of making the agreement stick. It is important to be frank about this and put it on the table because it is a fundamental difficulty with this type of corporatist arrangement which is common in Ireland and other countries.

The agreement contains positive elements relating to workplace arrangements. I welcome the proposed new office of employment rights director. I hope the number of labour inspectors will increase. I believe the commitment is to pursue matters incrementally before the end of next year and I hope we will see an aggressive approach to ensure that what the trade union rightly termed the race to the bottom in terms of employment conditions does not come about, partly resulting from increased migration.

The pay increases set out in the agreement are less than generous. They probably average out at between approximately 4% and 4.5% per year. When one takes inflation, which is almost 4% into account, it is very reasonable, if one is sceptical about these agreements, to point out that the agreement does not really provide for any serious improvement in terms of pay conditions over the course of the two and a quarter years of the agreement.

I read between approximately 30 or 40 pages of the part of the agreement which deals with the years leading up to 2016. The material in this section is astonishing. I have been forced to read much of it over the years and I can see where it is coming from and where the cut-and-paste approach has been used. The section contains material from the mission statement of the Department of Finance, mid-term economic reviews and the annual review of the economy which is submitted to the European Commission. One then throws in part of the national spatial strategy and the national development plan and Towards 2016 emerges.

I wonder whether it is worth doing this. It contains much in the way of general principle but very little in the way of specific commitments. I am not sure if I like the general principle that the Government should solicit and obtain the agreement of individual trade unionists and trade union leaders to a range of its programmes. If this happens, and the Taoiseach was quite clear about this earlier today, I am not sure whether this is what many individual trade unionists committed themselves to. I will give examples in case anyone thinks I am being too harsh. I did not seek out these examples; they merely struck me as being potentially interesting.

The section on social welfare pensions states that these pensions will be enhanced over the period in question, having regard to available resources and building on the existing Government commitment for a rate of €200 per week for social welfare pensioners to be achieved by 2007, which does not say much to me. In respect of the health strategy, the agreement talks about the commitment to approximately 3,000 beds. It states that there are 900 beds in place, 400 committed and possibly another 1,000 in the pipeline and states that the Government will merely have another review up to 2010. It makes it fairly clear but does not say that we will not meet the current commitment.

On the topic of public enterprise, a subject of serious interest, not least to the workers in Aer Lingus, all the agreement says is that the Government will consider which form of ownership is suitable, given international experience and Government priorities. The agreement contains a considerable amount of waffle and would be strengthened by its absence. It would be better and more comprehensible if the ten or 12 points of serious agreement between the parties which are new, fresh and easily understood were taken out and put to workers, social partners and the voluntary sector for agreement rather than producing between 70 and 100 pages, much of which no sane person could reasonably disagree with.

In conclusion, I accept virtually everything in this agreement but, as Senator John Paul Phelan noted, the process contains fundamental flaws of which we must be conscious and which we must do our best to reform.