Mr. David Begg:

I thank Senators for their very kind remarks and insightful observations about many of the points I raised. I am not sure I can do justice to all the comments and questions but I will try to do so. It may be easier for me to work in reverse and I will respond to Senator Hayden first.

Her question concerned the urban-rural divide, which is a very significant subject. Ireland is probably significantly different from many other European countries in that there has been a long delay in the emergence of an industrial working class. We have never politically held what would be called a "red-green" alliance that was certainly very prominent in Sweden and some other Nordic countries. There has been a rift, I suppose, which is somewhat unreal, as The Irish Times today indicates the number of people in farming who are working in industry at the same time. This unreal divide has affected our history.

The issue was most comprehensively addressed by a report which the National Economic and Social Council commissioned in 1992 from Lars Mjøset, the Norwegian academic, who considered the question of why Ireland had not managed to develop an autocentric system of development in the manner of other European countries. He dealt with many of the questions raised by the Senator regarding rural and urban sectors, as well as emigration, brain drain and its effects. He also dealt with the social influence of Catholicism and how that affected what happened in our country. It is a very big and interesting question. It is unfortunate that Mjøset's report in 1992 did not get a great deal of attention, as just after its publication the country began to take off as the Celtic tiger. The issue could be revisited with some benefit to us all, as it was a very perceptive insight into our position.

The Senator's second point concerned the emerging welfare model, and there is a really big problem. As I mentioned, there are some really strong limiting factors concerning demographics and debt, the provision of welfare states and their sustainability. One could ask what is the basic requirement of a welfare state, which should be to mitigate the risk that all of us are exposed to in daily life.

Some people can manage to handle that by virtue of their wealth but, in truth, nobody can handle all of the risks. That is why we need collective action.

In Europe, there is something of a collective action problem at present, even for those advanced welfare states that have insisted that competence on welfare should remain at national, rather than European, level. The reasons are very understandable. The Nordic countries, for example, wanted to protect their very good welfare states. The difficulty, however, is that the structures of the EMU and single currency are centralised in Europe. Irrespective of whether one agrees with European Central Bank policy, one must conclude it has extraordinary power and independence that are not balanced in any way by any social institution within the Community. Here we are stuck; there is a decision trap for us in Europe. Unless we find some way of unravelling it, we will not be able to make the type of social progress we would wish to make to complement whatever economic progress is made. This is an extremely interesting question.

I thank the Senator for the remarks on the tenement museum. It would be very desirable to try to make it permanent, if possible. Our idea is that, as we approach 1916, the story could evolve. I do not know whether many Senators have had the opportunity to visit the museum. It is a bit different in that some scenes from 1913 are re-enacted by a theatre group. They expose the tensions among families. In the more recent piece about 1913, there was a scene about the tension between a man who was deeply involved with Larkin and the strike and his brother, who signed the pledge. Further tensions that we all know about may be included. They obviously culminate in the civil war. In educational terms, the museum can be very useful. We were extremely pleased with it and what it achieved in the short time it was in existence. If we can arrange finance for it, we will certainly try to keep it going.

I absolutely agree on youth unemployment, a most appalling problem. The real danger is that a whole generation will be affected. I doubt that any person present in this room is unaffected by it. My nephew had to go to the United States last week to try to find employment. He was the first person in my extended family who had to do so. This is happening in thousands of houses every day of the week. It really is a very difficult problem.

Senator Landy referred to collective bargaining and its shape. In this regard, Senator Bacik addressed the crucial question, namely, the definition of collective bargaining in the first instance. Their lordships in the Supreme Court adopted a very strange definition. They said there should not be an industrial relations definition of collective bargaining but a dictionary definition. The dictionary, however, states collective bargaining is defined in terms of the ILO conventions, which is crucial.

It is very much necessary to build in genuine protection for people involved in organising activity. Any employer with pockets deep enough will take the hit of paying two years' salary, or whatever, to dismiss someone. There should be a really effective instrument whereby the courts can protect a person's job and ensure he is not victimised in that way.

The original attempts in the 2001 and 2004 Acts were quite good attempts to sort out the issue. Many might have called them an Irish solution to an Irish problem. They worked after a fashion but not everybody bought into the solution, and that is why we ended up in the Supreme Court. I hope we will be able to address this successfully. I am hopeful legislation on this will emerge before the end of the year. Senator David Cullinane addressed this. Everybody recognises that this year brings with it a certain drive in this regard. However, I am not under any illusion that it will be easily agreed upon by all the parties concerned. The most important point is that whatever is done on this occasion should be real and enduring. It should not really be some kind of fix-up that will fall apart at the first legal challenge.

I thank Senator Barrett very much for his comments. We had very good dialogue when he was a member of NESC and I enjoyed his contributions to the body. In many ways, we came from somewhat different perspectives but the dialogue was very fruitful. We certainly miss the Senator in this regard. One of the problems with NESC at present is that it is something of a stranded asset. In the period during which is constituted the intellectual underpinning of the social partnership model, it had a much more defined role than at present. What will happen in this regard I really do not know.

The Senator asked whether we sleepwalked into the EMU. Let me admit very honestly that it did not dawn on me that, in the event of an external economic shock, the full burden of adjustment would be borne by workers. If one considers everything drawn up on this at the time, one will note that the most influential paper was probably the 1996 ESRI commentary. This does not come out very clearly. I do not know the extent to which all the policymakers knew what occurred was likely to be the case. I believe Ireland entered the process without understanding fully what the discipline of monetary union actually meant. In countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium, and even Denmark, which is not a member but which is joined at the hip, everything is done with one eye on Germany. We did not look at it that way but just proceeded to do our own thing. We did not really realise just how serious all of that was. Sometimes I am inclined to say Ireland's relationship with Europe has been a little like the Irish breakfast. We conceive of ourselves as a bit like the hen in that we were involved in the breakfast. Very shortly, however, we will be like the pig, that is, very deeply committed. I refer to getting to the stage of a much more deeply integrated union when the institutional structure of the EMU is developed fully and finally. I am assuming that what I describe will be the ultimate outcome if the single currency stays.

Senator Fiach Mac Conghail spoke about the necessity for truth. That is a very good point. Perhaps we can now begin to look at the events of 100 years ago stripped of the myths that we have all grown up with. It just occurs to me how matters evolved in Ireland. The Informer, by Liam O'Flaherty, was published in 1925. The key figure in it, a man called Gypo Nolan, a member of a communist party cell in Dublin, is involved with a guy called McPhillips who has messed up an operation and has managed to kill someone. Nolan informs on McPhillips. That is the story in the book but the film of the same name has Nolan running from the IRA, not from a communist cell. A sort of cultural transition took place. Many events of this kind happened and we should examine them frankly. The truth of the matter is that, irrespective of how heroic, brave, wonderful or bad these people were, they were all human beings like ourselves and all had flaws.

Let me address the idea of Northern Ireland. Senator O'Sullivan asked whether we did enough to deal with sectarianism in Northern Ireland. I want to relate this to a point Senator Cummins made. He spoke about the Waterford connection and the Redmonds.

One of the things we have been able to do in recent years is to take some people from the Protestant working class areas of Belfast, such as Mount Vernon, and bring them, along with some of their Nationalist fellow workers, to the Peace Village in Messines in Belgium. There is a very interesting story about Messines and Major William Redmond, who was a member of the 16th (Irish) Division which fought alongside the 36th (Ulster) Division. In one of the battles, William Redmond was injured and the man who rescued him was John Meeke, a Protestant from the 36th (Ulster) Division. Meeke managed to pull him back behind their own lines and get him some treatment but Redmond was so badly injured that he died several hours later. Major Redmond had a particular view on the reasons why he was involved in the conflict. He did not want to be seen as someone who was supporting the British war machine and left instructions that he should not be buried in a military cemetery. His grave is just outside the cemetery in Messines. Ironically, Meeke, who survived for three years afterwards before eventually succumbing to his injuries, died outside the period of time when he could be legitimately buried within the military cemetery. That was his aspiration. He wanted to be buried there but could not be. Between those two characters there is an extraordinary historical bind, which is quite different from how many people in Northern Ireland perceive their heritage. Work like that can be quite useful. My colleague in Northern Ireland, Peter Bunting, has done quite a lot of work in this area, much of which is below the radar. Because of its nature, it has to be kept below the radar.

Senator Bacik referred to the question of voluntarism in industrial relations. We have a conundrum here because the voluntarist system worked very well when everybody wanted it to work. When we get to a point in any system at which the first recourse is to the courts, then we begin to migrate into a more legalistic system. We have not really found the correct water level for all of that. However, in the course of this legislation, if it is forthcoming, that issue will have to be addressed.

Yesterday the Central Bank launched a €15 coin to commemorate 1913. The launch took place in the museum in Glasnevin Cemetery, which is a beautiful facility. The irony is that if one looks out the window of the upper floor of that museum, one can see the graves of both James Larkin and William Martin Murphy. That speaks of what a tragedy the Lock-out was. It begs the question of why people should not try to agree. Should the lesson for us be that we must figure out ways of having some national agreement about the distribution of wealth in the country, rather than resorting to zero-sum conflicts? That is what our Nordic friends and, particularly, countries such as the Netherlands have managed to achieve. They have very deeply embedded institutions for that purpose. That is why I feel that institutions are so important.

In response to the Senator's key question, Congress has no position on the future of the Seanad. My personal position is that institutions of a political and labour market nature are always important in a country and should not be dispensed with unless and until one is absolutely sure there is no purpose to be served by continuing with them, or they cannot be adjusted into a better set of circumstances. It strikes me that in our new relationship with Europe, to which I referred earlier, we will have to become very deeply involved in a way that the Oireachtas has not been before. There is a big difference in the way, for example, the Danish Parliament has handled Europe and the way the Irish Parliament has handled it. In that context, there is a strong case for some institution of the Parliament, whatever it might be, to be much more deeply involved and engaged with Europe, in examining the European questions coming our way, bearing in mind our future role as the pig in these relationships.

I thank the Cathaoirleach again. It has been a great privilege and an honour to be here today.