Gerald Nash (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I support the comments of my colleague, Senator Humphreys. I am not really surprised by Senator Ó Domhnaill's comments as it seems Fianna Fáil, the party only too happy to support a public bailout of the banks, is being peculiar in not being prepared to envisage a position where there may be additional subsidies to vital public services that make our economy work and provide so much in terms of social cohesion in the capital city. It is no wonder Fianna Fáil has a Dublin problem and will continue to have a problem if that is the type of rhetoric we continue to hear from it.I am disappointed that my colleague, Senator Reilly, and others decided to deliberately confuse the issue of the proposal of an employer-labour conference with the functioning of the very important institutions that are the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, and the Labour Court. I value the work of both institutions that have served this country extremely well. I know more than most about the Workplace Relations Commission for it was the Minister, Deputy Bruton, and I who set it up, and I resent any accusations that might be made that we do not support the work of the WRC or the Labour Court. Nobody should hide behind that as an excuse not to support this motion. They are entirely different animals and they seek to do entirely different things. I have said it before and I will say it again. The employer-labour Conference serves an entirely different purpose. It predates the social partnership model and it worked very effectively in a number of instances in the 1970s and 1980s in terms of attaining industrial peace when that seemed like a distant ambition for people caught up in protracted, or potentially protracted, disputes in that very difficult period for our country. The employer-labour conference can grapple with major policy questions that a Government may be incapable of facing because of numbers and other challenges. I am intrigued by the proposition that clearly came from Government this week, perhaps in response to this motion, that a form of labour-employer economic forum would be established. I would be interested to learn more about that and what that innovation seeks to achieve.

Unlike Senator Gavan, I am not particularly concerned about official economic development figures. We all accept that the GDP figures published recently leave a lot to be desired, but the proof is there in that people are getting back to work, the real economy is growing rapidly, and the economic recovery is spreading evenly across the country, despite what some people would say because it serves their interests to say that is not the case. It is the case.

This is not about centralising decision making or collective bargaining in some national body and bypassing the important work of shop stewards on the shop floor and trade union officials. The reality is that in the absence of the Labour Party's presence in government and an initiative like the employer-labour conference, there would be no formal role for trade unions in decision making in this country.

I support what my colleague, Senator Alice Mary Higgins, said. I welcome the points she made on the joint labour committee system that we were proud to reconstitute just a few short years ago. With regard to the joint labour committees, far from falling off the agenda, it is hoped that the Minister will shortly sign the second employment regulation order for the security industry that will ensure a living wage for 12,500 security contract workers across this State in a very vulnerable sector. The joint labour committee system is up and running. We would like to see Government policy being initiated and respected by employers with regard to hospitality and retail. That is not the case currently, and there is work to be done on that.

I also welcome Senator Higgins's eloquent defence of public services. Perhaps we should move away from the characterisation of providing citizens' resources to public sector bodies and public services as some kind of subvention or subsidy when it would be more appropriately referred to as public investment in services we all use and need.

I am very interested in the development the Minister has announced on the economic forum. We need to hear more about that. I appeal to Government to have the confidence to accept this innovation because we cannot simply stand still and expect that the economic recovery will continue or, as some people famously said, let us keep the recovery going. We need to innovate constantly and be smart about the institutional responses we make as a Government and as an Oireachtas, to the key policy challenges we face.

I hope to be proven wrong in the coming period but I suggest we may well be back here at some point in the next few months as many of the industrial relations challenges we believe we will face come down the tracks. They may be intractable and difficult to resolve, and we may need an intervention of this nature to deal with some of the big policy questions this country will face. I appeal to colleagues across the floor to support the motion.