James Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and wish her well in her portfolio.

This motion has several parts to it and I agree with the first paragraph. I welcome the official figures, according to which there are now more than 2 million people employed for the first time since 2009. That is an annual increase of 56,000. The forecasts are that this increase is set to continue. My constituency of Dublin Fingal has thousands of students and one of the youngest and fastest growing populations in Europe. This is also likely to continue, but they will all need jobs. The area will need many jobs in the coming years. I was pleased to welcome the Minister to the constituency last week when she announced a further 80 jobs in Balbriggan. Fingal has had some success. Its unemployment rate has dropped by 32.25% since Fine Gael took office in 2011 in coalition with the Labour Party. The improvement continues.

We must protect workers and their rights. We must ensure that unscrupulous businesses that deprive workers of their rights are punished. We must ensure that every worker gets a fair wage. By growing our economy, we can provide good jobs for people that pay well, enable them to live without depending on State support and enable parents to raise their children without the fear of getting behind in their mortgage or bill payments. Jobs bring independence for individuals and certainty and better futures for their families.

More than this must be done to ensure that workers are treated well. We must provide good and affordable child care, as it is a great burden on working families and prevents many others from working. We are, as a Government, examining how to encourage people to return home, particularly those with expertise that we badly need, but there is also a large cohort, mainly of women, who are at home and are highly skilled but who cannot afford to go to work because of the cost of child care. We must afford them the opportunity to return to the workforce. We need to reduce taxes for working people so that they take home more of their wages in disposable income. This is opposed to increasing wages, which would make us uncompetitive in a highly competitive international market.

I agree with the motion's second paragraph. The purpose of growing the economy is not just for the economy's sake itself, but to ensure a better quality of life for all of our people. A growing economy will create and sustain well-paid jobs and will translate into better working conditions and improved pay while retaining our competitiveness.We need to examine the other areas which affect people’s ability to work. We need more housing and better health care, along with more schools and education facilities, to ensure our young people are well able to compete for jobs both in this economy and elsewhere.

The motion addresses the need for unions. I fully subscribe to this and believe unions have a useful role in protecting workers and that every worker has a right to join one. Paragraphs Nos. 5 to 7, inclusive, of the motion are problematic, however. Paragraphs Nos. 4 and 5 state employer-labour bodies tasked with intervention in industrial disputes no longer exist and call on the Government to create a new body with the specific function of intervening in protracted industrial relation disputes. What then are the functions of the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, and the Labour Court? The WRC and the Labour Court do good work, resolving hundreds of disputes every year without the need for strike action. They both have highly skilled and able individuals who are respected by both sides. It would be irresponsible to say these bodies are unfit for purpose because of the Luas and Dublin Bus strikes. As has been acknowledged by the proposers of this motion, in the past few days strike action at Dublin Bus has been suspended as both sides went back into talks this morning at the WRC. We do not need a new body to intervene in industrial disputes. Changing it would be a knee-jerk reaction to current events in a single company.

Paragraph No. 7 of the motion is also highly problematic. It calls for a restoration of the public subsidy for Dublin Bus to its pre-crisis level. This is not the approach we should take for several reasons. First, Dublin Bus's total revenue base is only 1% lower than it was in 2008. The company now makes a good profit of roughly €10 million when the public subsidy is included. Second, we should base the public subsidy to Dublin Bus based on what it needs now, not on what it needed eight years ago. Any money we give to Dublin Bus should represent good value for the taxpayer and the passenger. This means we should assess the public subsidy by reference to service improvements and efficiency.

The paragraph also refers to the amount of public subsidies to public transport services in other EU cities. Subventions vary significantly within the EU, making it difficult to adequately benchmark subvention funding across EU member states due to the different structures and funding sources used in public transport provision across the EU. However, the ratio of public service obligation subsidy in Ireland would tend to be closer to UK levels, rather than the more generous subvention ratios in some other EU countries. We should be examining funding for public transport as it is the way forward. Dublin and other large cities cannot cope with more cars. We need investment in our public transport infrastructure and its subsidies. The Government has already laid out plans for the electrification of the DART line to Balbriggan and for metro. The priority, however, in subventing public transport services must be to ensure the taxpayer and passengers receive value for money from the significant Exchequer assistance provided each year. The provision of any additional subsidy should include measurable and improved service delivery and efficiency. The Department has tabled proposals for increased subvention in 2017 in line with this approach. I am delighted Dublin Bus management and unions are back in the WRC and wish them well in settling this dispute.

It is important the jobs created are good and well-paid and that workers’ rights are protected. I do not believe there is anything between us on the motion’s proposals in that regard. However, I do not support the creation of a new industrial relations entity.