 This week marked a decisive shift in Ireland's social and economic journey. As it's now abundantly clear, our economic recovery is under way, slow, but it is under way. The economy is growing, unemployment is falling, and confidence is slowly, but surely returning. But economic recovery means nothing if the benefits are not felt by every individual family and community. We need a social recovery as well as an economic recovery, a social recovery that shares renewed prosperity to every individual family and community. And that's why I'm saying that this week is marking a decisive shift, because in budget 2015, we took the first step in Ireland's social recovery as well as its economic recovery. And I want to talk about our vision for a social recovery and a shared prosperity, not just in Ireland, but in Europe at large. The economic crisis of recent years has damaged the EU and seen confidence in the institution's fall. In the process, we run the risk of losing sight of a fundamental truth, namely that the European community was founded to prevent future wars, to bring peace and prosperity to the continent. The Schuman Declaration, which led to the establishment of the community, stated, Europe will not be made all at once or according to a single plan, but only built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. It was that sense of solidarity that helped Ireland transform economically, politically, and socially. Because solidarity didn't stop at sharing values, it also meant sharing benefits. And as we emerge now from the crisis and to build the economic recovery, solidarity is going to be absolutely essential once more, because solidarity will ensure that renewed prosperity is shared by all. And solidarity will be at the heart of social recovery. The first step toward social recovery, in my view, is work. In Ireland, we are making firm progress in increasing employment and reducing unemployment. More than 70,000 additional people are at work since 2012. Unemployment has fallen from its crisis peak then of 15.1% to 11.1% now, and it is continuing to fall. So while we are unquestionably going in the right direction, unemployment remains too high in Europe and across the EU. It is very difficult to see the founding fathers of the European Union actually accepting some of the levels of unemployment which are being experienced by a number of societies in Europe and even in the very strong, large economies, we have levels of unemployment, particularly among young people, which have to be worrying in terms of anybody who shares European ideas on solidarity. So we have to increase the pace of progress, both here and in Europe. And a job is the single best protection against poverty. A job is the single best way to build a better financial future for a person or their family. And that's why the budget this week was pretty much almost entirely about work, how to develop it, how to grow it, and how to have people who've been locked out of work through unemployment become participants again in a very active and positive way in the world of work. We did a number of critical things. We insured investment in the economy. We announced new incentives to help people back to work. A lot of them influenced by the learning that we have had from successful European economies where the level of unemployment is very low. And small countries like Austria have achieved this. Other countries like Germany have models which mean that it's possible to actually have very active pro-employment policies while carefully managing public finances. For low and middle income earners in work, we've provided some tax reductions so that they get to keep more of their take-home pay. Starting with investment, the budget provides an additional $3 billion in resources for the domestic economy compared to previous plans. This will help to sustain the already strengthening recovery in the domestic economy, which will support an additional 50,000 jobs next year with, I hope, unemployment set to fall under 10% by the end of 2015. That would be below what is now the European average. But I think we have to keep saying, recalling that to have a European average that's above 11% in a certain sense is just truly shocking. And it is something in terms of all who care about the future of the institution that we focus on that and bringing that figure down relentlessly. Unemployed people need to be ready to take up these jobs. And the government recently launched Pathways to Work 2015 to map the way forward in providing people with the necessary skills and experiences to get back to work. To support the implementation of Pathways, $1.6 billion will be available in 2015 to provide approximately 300,000 work and training places. We are also doubling the number of jobs plus positions to 6,000 would have focused on young unemployed people at a cost of $13.5 million in a full year. Jobs Plus pays a monthly cash grant to employers to help with wage costs when they recruit long-term unemployed workers from the unemployment register. It's been a tremendous success to date, and I'm very pleased that we are expanding the scheme next year. In addition, I'm announcing a new incentive to help job seekers with families to return to work, the Back to Work family dividend. Through this scheme, long-term unemployed job seekers with children who leave welfare to return to work can retain the child-related portion of their social welfare payment on a tapered basis over two years. That's worth roughly 30 euros a week per child. The scheme will be worth 1,550 euros per child for the first year of employment or self-employment. We're including people who start their own businesses as contractors or whatever. And they'll get half that amount in the second year, i.e. 15 euros a week, to just ease that transition of leaving, if you like, the certainty at a low level of welfare payments for the uncertainty of the world of work, where hopefully once you become embedded in working again, inevitably after a period, your pay and your wages and your work opportunities increase. So the dividend will help increase the pace of the progress we are making in helping people back to work. It will help to boost the recovery, reduce welfare expenditure in the long run, and most importantly, help the families in question to build a better financial future for themselves. In the corporation tax system, a suite of measures, including revisions to the tax residency rules and adjustments to the R&D tax credit, will maintain the competitive nature of the Irish corporate tax structure while ensuring a fair contribution from the corporate sector. Finally, a number of small measures we targeted at startups and SMEs, which formed the backbone of employment creation in the Irish economy. These measures highlight our unrelenting focus on helping people back into work. But we're not just focusing on helping people return to work, we are reducing tax for low and middle income earners to ensure that those at work take home more and begin to benefit from the recovery. We're starting small, but this is just the start of what I hope will be a prolonged tax reform process in Ireland. A modest and carefully targeted package of income tax reductions of approximately 500 million will boost the disposable incomes of low and middle income families. All the available levers, including rates, bans, and thresholds in relation to taxation, have been employed to deliver a progressive income tax reform which targets low and middle income earners and ensures that proportionately they gain the most. The changes in the universal social charge, the USC, including an increase in the entry point from 10,000 to 12,000, a broadening of the lower rate band and cuts to the two lowest rates by 0.5% each, will be of particular benefit to low earning workers. In the income tax code, the standard rate band has been increased by 1,000 for a single person, and the top marginal rate has been reduced by 1%. Taken together with the adjustment to the top USC rate, which has increased for high earners, these changes cap benefits for incomes over 70,000. So in other words, everybody gains, but the largest proportion of the gains is in the 30 to 70,000 area, whether individual or couples with families. So it's an extremely progressive package that focuses the relief on those who most need it, low and middle income workers. I want to also touch briefly on the budget for social protection in 2015, which is an example of a wider approach and represents really a modest reflation in terms of the domestic economy and domestic confidence, which is as critical for individuals as it is obviously for businesses. So overall expenditure will fall in social protection. I think that's important to say, helping to ensure the public finances remain strong. I focused as minister on getting people back to work that has lowered the social welfare bill and in turn that has provided for a very large pay into the rest of the economy, or into the rest of government expenditure, particularly in the health area, going on for three years now and at the same time providing continuation of core social welfare rates and in this particular year, a 200 million euro social welfare improvement package targeted at people who need support. So that 200 million is targeted at increases in certain payments and new incentives, such as the back to work family dividend that I spoke about and also another very important payment, the family income supplement, which is paid to people in work who have children and where we're expanding, we've reformed it, the IT dealing with it and we're increasing the spend on that. So the targeted increases also include not just the family work dividend, but a monthly increase in child benefit for each child. This recognizes the sacrifices that families made during the economic crisis and the fact that families are continuing to face difficulties. In the statement of priorities earlier this year, the government promised a new deal on living standards for hard pressed families and this increase is in line with that commitment. It is in line with the concept of solidarity that I mentioned earlier and it's in line with the concept of sharing prosperity and with sharing having a shared social recovery. In building the social recovery, the government will demonstrate something else, namely that a government can both get the job done and can care. So we can both be prudent and provide for our people in a sustainable way and those two things are critical. Too often in Irish politics, we find ourselves trapped by the past, by the poor decisions and the grim consequences of yesterday. Wreckless, heartless, thoughtless economic policies. To be honest, Broad Ireland and contributed to Ireland coming to a place grimmer and darker that many of us, if we were having this conversation 10 years ago, would have thought possible. Our people have suffered and our communities have suffered and too often the ensnaring consequences of yesterday's failures prevented the state from doing all that it could to ameliorate those difficulties. The long dark shadow of the financial crisis still hangs over towns and farms and estates throughout the country and yet slowly I think the light is beginning to break through and this budget is part of that. It's evidence of an Irish government beginning to shape a vision not about our past, but about our future. And you know, we are moving away from that historic period of the bank guarantee and we're moving now to how we create our future. It's evidence that Ireland battered as it was by misfortune and mismanagement. I think it's rising again and growing again, charting of course towards a stronger, more sustainable and more compassionate future. The kind of future our people deserve. On Tuesday we took the first tentative steps towards constructing a new and a better society. What I believe and what my party, the Labour Party believes is that what we build now as we emerge from the depths of recession and austerity must be worth more than what came before. The Irish people have too often seen their state and their governments as the deliverer of harsh medicine in bad times or the reckless partner of unscrupulous interests in good times. We have a chance with this budget and the budgets to come to break away from that legacy and do better for all of us. Indeed, those who seek to govern Ireland have to do better as the increasing fragmentation of our politics tells us. We have to do better and not only that but ensure that we're compassionate and competent in equal measure. The Irish people should never be asked to choose between a government that cares and a government that gets the job done. It is after all one of the fundamental ideas of my party that the two goals need not be in competition. With this budget, we've renewed the central duty of elected governments to tackle the problems none of us alone can hope to face. We will put roofs over people's heads and some money back in their pockets. We will improve our systems of public utilities and we will do so while protecting people who can lease the forge to contribute. We will spend but I very much hope we will do so wisely. We will save but we will do so in a humane way. We will get people back to work and we will do and we will cut no corners and leave no reservoir of potential untapped. I want to see all citizens in Ireland, families and people in Ireland, participants. They may not be able to get a job today. The route to getting employment and becoming a full economic participant may lie through further education and training. If so, we have some really good offers in relation to that. Solidarity is really what all of this is about and this is what the social recovery is about. I'm aware that our fortunes in Ireland are closely intertwined with the economic outlook for the wider Euro area, which does remain worryingly fragile. Too often in Ireland, a certain image of Europe has prevailed. The Irish people have long been at the forefront of the European project, advocates of peace and understanding and cooperation with the rest of our shared continent. And yet for all of that, the concept of union has for a lot of people in this country been distant, a remote presence in Brussels rather than a living, breathing part of our identity and our cultural life. There's always a temptation for politicians and the public to use Europe as, you know, a shorthand for vague forces beyond our control as our economic saviour or our distant taskmaster. I think we can change that perception of the EU. Just as we move from crisis to recovery at home, so too can we work with our partners and fellow citizens of the EU to take our joint project to the next step. The greatest peace project really in the history of humanity has delivered on its aim largely to eliminate war between its constituent nation states. It has through treaties and agreements taken on a great role in our economic and political lives. Yet, as we knew when we put together our budget last Tuesday, an economic system without a social core really is a recipe for alienation and disharmony. The EU has to be a positive force in the lives of citizens, not just a guiding hand to economies or a means of settling disputes. The system we have built as sovereign governments must undergo, I think, a second creation, this time by citizens to create a democratic and social Europe of which we each feel ownership and a sense of belying that Europe is the home place as much as Ireland is the home country, or France is the home country, or Italy or any other country in Europe is the home country. But Europe is also our home and we should be able to have those dual allegiances, if you like, in terms of what we're building. The founding principles of the Labour Party have always committed to international cooperation and this country's long-standing belief in human rights and foreign aid, peacekeeping and free movement has ensured we think almost as much beyond our shores as within the boundaries of our island, not least because so many of our people have left and are going on now for several centuries to seek a living and to seek their fortune in other countries. Europe can be a place where people and nations both come together and work together towards shaping a better continent and a better world for all of us. It can be a shining light for democracy and compassion for our common values of unity through diversity. It can be a continent that cares not just about numbers and borders and the finer parts of legislation, but for the social development and wellbeing of all of its people, whether they're French or German, Irish or Fin, Polish or Dutch or Romanian. Ireland has always been, I think, a very good performer in Europe. Now as we return as an equal partner in the union, I think we need to seek to be standout performers again and to be at the forefront of crafting the next major development in this historic project. That's creating a truly social Europe and again I think the first building block of that is getting people back to work and getting unemployment down. It is crucial that the work of the new EU institutions remain firmly focused on mobilizing a stronger response to unacceptably high levels of unemployment. This emphasis is at the heart of both the strategic agenda agreed by the June European Council and the political guidelines presented by the incoming commissioner, commission president, President Junker in July. It's clear that across Europe, member states need to adapt their employment policies and education and training systems to be more responsive to economic reality. This needs to be a critical focus of the European semester process. I want to say in conclusion that the first stage of Ireland's recovery is complete. So we're at the, if you like, the end of the beginning and now we've to move forward. The aim now is to sustain this recovery and to begin the next stage of restoring living standards for individuals, for families, for older people, for low and middle income workers. Building the social recovery, in other words, by renewing prosperity and ensuring that it's felt by all. And a social recovery, as I said, that in the wider EU context, I believe, is as essential for the EU as it is for Ireland. Today also marks the day on which both the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan, is in Belfast to take part in the renewed process in relation to Northern Ireland, accompanied by a Labour Party Minister of State, Sean Sherlock. So both parties in government are committed to the process of building and sustaining the peace in Northern Ireland. I'm very conscious that not just the United States, but the European Union played a critical role in facilitating all of the achievements of the peace process. And again, I do hope that in the context of how the talks develop, that the European Union, again, will be as it was at critical stages, essentially one of the strongest supporters, political, social guarantors of the process, as well as the two governments and indeed, our friends in America. Thank you very much.