 beautiful setting. We look forward to an interesting discussion. The Institute of International European Affairs is going around for 30 years and we are a think tank so we try to provide a forum for discussion of important issues. So why are we here this evening? Well the European Union is in a very interesting phase of its development and there is of course Brexit, nobody in the Board of Communities needs to be told about the importance of that. But there are so many other issues of the European Union is trying to tackle. So we put together a panel today to try to explore one or two of those issues. We're going to talk a little bit around globalization and how it is impacting on everybody's lives, how it's impacting on the future of work. People living in this part of the world will be familiar with the impact of globalization through eBay and the loss of jobs here a couple of years ago. So on the one hand globalization brings jobs to this part of the world and on the other hand where labor costs can be found more cheaply that has impact on everybody. And we'll also talk about issues around automation and the loss of jobs in banking and driving. And we might talk about the impact of trade and the pressure from President Trump and others who are not necessarily interested in the order that has established over the last few years. So it's going to be a very interesting discussion and often with these kind of events the best part is the Q&A. So we were encouraged, especially those of you who have a glass of alcohol in front of you, to be as challenging as possible. So with that thank you very much for coming here this evening. I acknowledge the presence of Debt and Brannock TD and also councillors who are with us and candidates I believe. So I hope you'll all take part in show lead and then we look forward to hearing all of your opinions. Thank you very much, Gavin. Thank you very much Barry. Thank you all for coming. I'm Gavin Riley and political correspondent with TV3 who's delighted to ask and try and facilitate. Hopefully it should be fairly interesting chat with you for the next hour and a half or so. As you know Helen McIntyre has changed her hair and colour and everything else. As for those of you who didn't catch up, Helen McIntyre, given the nature of globalization and European relations as they are, was asked to tag along with the T-shirt when he had a meeting with the new Spanish Prime Minister earlier on so she is in Madrid. So Michael Darcy, Minister of State at the Department of Finance has kindly agreed to step in her place so we're delighted that Michael was able to make it. As well we have Dan O'Brien, Chief Economist with the IEA and also Economist with Independent Newspapers and Marie Sherlock who is Chief Economist with SIP2, one of the countries largest trade unions. The empty chair at the end will in hopefully in not too long be occupied by Matt Carthy, MEP for Sinn Fein for the Midlands Northwest constituency. The only reason he's not here now is because he's on his way back from Strasbourg. He's on the road in a car on the M1 but again he's just come from a super national parliament which is about as great as an emblem of globalization and international cooperation as you could possibly think of. So he's literally just on his way back he landed from Strasbourg about half an hour ago. He's in the car on the way up and we'll hear from him in good course. It's an interesting day to be talking about globalization because obviously those of you who are downstairs watching the football for the last two hours it's the most festival, greatest celebrated festival of the world's most global sport you could ever think of and everyone's going to be looking at the interactions between nations for the next couple of weeks or so. But I remember reading something fairly recently by a really well respected economist called Simon Cooper who is also a really, really noted football writer which is an unusual overlap in that kind of Venn diagram. And he says he reckons the reason why international football became so big in the 70 90s was because it was basically the replacement for war. You know we live in the time in Europe where we've had the longest successive era of peace where no European countries have been at armed conflict with each other in the history of Europe and the history of mankind. And he reckons that basically sport has taken over and that sport is kind of a civilized war where you just pick out your 11 best people and they have a war for an hour and a half, 45 minutes each side. They swap ends at half time in the war, repeat the war and they go on and have more war and the winner gets to have more war with someone else. But it's basically the way that you express countries. And yet it's actually interesting and I don't know how many of you are football fans and getting the fact that you're actually here and not watching the World Cup means that not many of you are in fact soccer fans. But it's interesting that in fact it seems like international football has maybe died off a little bit in the last couple of years because we now actually live in a world where nations and countries and national identities don't matter quite as much because we don't live in the little silos that we used to where we didn't really know what was going on from one country to the next or it was very difficult to communicate. We all now know that with the way in which communication has sped up that in fact national boundaries mean almost less now than they have ever done. And that has some great good things because it means that we understand people from other parts of the world and off a lot easier. But it also has its downsides because it means that if there's parts of the world in which you're looking for manufacturing and it's cheaper to go to a sweatshop in the Southeast Pacific Rim then obviously that has its downsides for certain parts of the world too. So we're going to talk a little bit about all of that. The title of the forum is whose job is it anyway which obviously is a reference to Willow who's going to actually be doing the jobs in this globalized world where there's fewer and fewer barriers or maybe there aren't fewer and fewer barriers and we're talking about that as well. But also if globalization does come with certain risks whose job is it to deal with risks. Is it you know national governments the likes of which the micro represents. Is it the EU as a whole who actually has to step in and try and safeguard the ordinary citizen the ordinary worker the ordinary person on the street the ordinary man woman boy and girl in school who has to step in and defend those people as globalization begins to tear down whatever there is still left of borders between the world. We're going to start with contributions from each of the speakers. I'm going to start just by the virtue of seniority because he's here and he could I'm within arms distance if I don't like what he says. We'll start with Michael Darcy finish TV for Wexford and Minister of State at the Department of Finance. Michael what are your thoughts globalization but how has it helped Ireland to what are its risks. Yeah well it certainly has helped Ireland a lot and if you look at where we are today where we were just a short number of years ago come back to 2011 when we lost hundreds of thousands of jobs at the bottom of the recession and one of the things that we have done successfully is we have brought in a lot of international companies globalized names. So if you take the sector that I'm involved in with a lot of banking and international finance companies put it in context. We have nine of the top ten international banks in the world with operations in Ireland. We have eight of the top insurance companies in the world and then more importantly than actual individual sectors. The future that I see is technology and we have about 18 of the 20 technology companies getting all the household names that you would know and understand whether it's Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Intel. All of those are here and we've done well out of it. There's about 225,000 jobs that are foreign directives and jobs directly from those companies here in our jurisdiction in Ireland. And calculation is there's another job attached to each one of those. That's about 450,000 jobs either directly responsible by FDI companies or indirectly employed from them. So to put that into context we're getting close to 2.2 million people back to work. And those are hugely important jobs for the jurisdiction that is Ireland. And one of the things that I was looking at, you know, the poster on the wall and then the piece on the table is where the jobs, you know, and what the future is going to be, we really don't know. And I'm just amazed at the speed of technology, automation, robotics, machine learning that's intersected and I have which is financial services. So you would have seen Citigroup, Citigroup are one of the largest banks in the world. They've been in Ireland since the 1950s. 3,000 employees in Ireland, 2,600 employees in Ireland. And they said yesterday that they believe within three to five years they will lose 10,000 jobs because of automation, because of technology. And that's a huge challenge to try and ensure that those people don't find themselves in a space that when I was a kid in Gory, there was a letter factory. And it was a letter factory closed, 200 jobs went. But these were people who only knew one thing, how to manage that. And that was the late 1970s. And most of those men, particularly, I was nine years of age at that stage. I always remember over the next decades, those men, none of them were re-employed. And that's the challenge of how you get people who have a skill set in one area to redirect themselves and become re-employed in a different area. And we see that internationally in the U.S. in coal, the conversation about how we use coal and bring coal and technology, how we cross over to get those people back into a block. It's a big challenge. And the challenge is huge when you consider we don't know what the next technology is going to bring or where the next technology is going to have an impact on. You kind of touched upon driving, automation. You know, there are millions of people worldwide who are employed in driving and deliveries. And those are challenges that we face. But for me, for me, as somebody who saw the impact on people who lose their job in woodworking, without an ability to redirect themselves, well, that's the big challenge. Fascinating thoughts. Thank you very much for that, Michael. Marie, you've got to talk to you just as a jumping off point for your couple of thoughts about what Michael has said. When he lists off the number of people that the employers, the major impact on which globalization and foreign investment has had in Ireland, it's responsible for such a amount of jobs that it's very difficult not to look at a top level staff like that. It employs 450,000 people and say that globalization has been really helpful for Ireland. Well, globalization has been part of the area of success story, particularly, I suppose, since the 1950s in Ireland and I suppose the number of firms that are coming. So, you know, I think it's a positive and I think sometimes we ought to often, particularly on the left, globalization has become a dirty word or a bad word. It doesn't need to be, I suppose, once it's tempered by the correct, I suppose, fiscal and social policy framework. And I suppose that's one of the things that, you know, when I was asked to speak today, I suppose one of the things that really jumped out at me was, you know, whose responsibility is it to try and address the negative impact of globalization and their positive impacts and negative impacts of globalization both here in Ireland and I suppose across the European Union. And just in terms of that response, social policy in the EU has always been the Cinderella of policy in the European Union. So even going back to the Treaty of Rome, there was a reference there as there were each successive treaty to promote the well-being of all the peoples of the EU. But I suppose there was a school of thought then and it remains now that price stability and economic integration were going to be the primary tools for improving the welfare of people in the European Union. And I suppose we have seen that that has failed, that alone cannot ensure, I suppose, a decent standard of living to everybody working in the European Union. So I see that there's two crises in the EU at the moment, which are directly linked to, I suppose, the downsides of globalization, which is why that we need a very strong social response by the European Union. So the twin crises are the political crisis and the productivity crisis. And we're all aware of the political crisis, Brexit, and the increasing number of countries that are electing far-right populist parties, Euroskeptive parties. So we're seeing it in Austria, in Poland, in Hungary, with the Netherlands, there's Sweden, Denmark, Italy, and I'm sure I'm leaving out a number of countries. And indeed in Germany, the accession to parliament or the AFD in Germany, I think is a wake-up call to all of us, that Euroskepticism and the far-right of the very significant presence now, and hence the role of social policy in the EU to actually combat some of the negative perceptions around the EU project, is all the more important now. The second crisis with regards to productivity, and this isn't really spoken about very much, but I think is very important in terms of understanding the genesis for some of the policy changes that we have seen and promoted by the European Union over the past, I suppose, a year or three years in particular. So going back 20 years ago, productivity increases in the European Union were about 2.5%, between 2 and 2.5%. We're now at less than 1%. Half the rate in the US, and certainly a fraction of the productivity growth that we're seeing in the main competitive threats in the brief countries and in other emerging economies. And I think ultimately that is prompting a huge concern within the European Union about how we're going to compete into the future. Because if we can't increase our productivity, then we can't, I suppose, there is a limit to the growth of the European Union and ultimately sustainability of the European Union project. So what has happened over the past number of years? Well, we've seen under Yonkers' commission the unveiling of their social pillar, their pillar of social rights, which I suppose has been a very profound and welcome change in terms of a focus on fairness, combating inequality, and that the EU is taking a leading role now in a way before the view was that social policy should be just delegated to the member states. But the EU does have a role in coordinating and in funding and I suppose this is one of the big disappointing points at the moment is that we're having this big discussion over the EU budget and yet about 80% of the EU budget is not being allocated to, I suppose, the things that I would consider are necessary with regards to employment and digital skills agenda, etc. That is so greatly needed within the European Union. So I think the promotion of the pillar of social rights is very important. We're not seeing the funding behind it. Indeed, a lot of it has taken the form of recommendations as opposed to directives to member states. So in terms of that impetus to member states to act is not as great as what we would like. But it is a start and it's the direction we need to go if we're to sustain the EU project, I suppose, over the long term. Okay, thanks very much for that, Marie. Fascinating thoughts. Dana Bryant, she's the guest here at the IEA. I suppose you could argue that globalization works two ways. It has been a rising tide which has lifted a lot of boats, but there is a danger that once you reach a critical mass that if the rising tide continues to rise that it just drains everyone that we thought was helping. Yeah, okay. Take that a moment. Yeah, okay. I suppose I like talking about this because there's some subjects that are pretty depressing, but I think globalization is overall has a lot of good aspects to it. The downsides of it tend to be exaggerated and there's a lot we can do about the downsides, a lot of policy responses we can have for the downside. And you know, one of the things just to come back in your World Cup sort of pieces, the difference between people, countries trading with each other in the World Cup is there doesn't have to be any losers. You know, countries trading with each other, both sides can win. It's not a win-lose situation. That's the sort of, the win-win dimension of commerce and trade I think are really important part of that piece. So look, let me just look at those three things. The positives of globalization, the exaggerated downsides and what we can do about it. Let's look at the downsides. When people talk about globalization, there tends to be, and I don't think it's just on the left, I think it's across the political spectrum, and I think it may need to do with human bias is that we tend to look more at the plant closure that can devastate an area than we do to celebrate this week. The IDA came out, for example, with yet another, you know, increase in the amount of jobs that companies, it brings in creation. That's not going to get the front page, but you know, when Adele shuts down, that's going to get the front page because we tend to report the bad things more than we report the good thing. So I think that's across the political spectrum. So, you know, when people talk about globalization, we think about, you know, left behind in the U.S. and Rust belts and these sort of things. But hey, there are more people working, more jobs in the United States today than there have ever been in history. People always talking about jobs going and jobs going abroad and technology killing off jobs. There are more people, nearly 160 million people working in the United States than, that's more than ever in history. It's the same thing in Japan, it's the same thing in Australia, in the European Union, it is also the same thing. There have never been more jobs in Europe than today. Now, Ireland, we're almost back, as we know, massive crisis, but let's also think about globalization. Between the foundation of this stage in the 1960s, we were the opposite of globalization. We were closed off. What happened jobs in this country? We actually shrank the number of people working in this country. For the first 50 years of this state's history, the number of people working in this country actually declined. If we go back 25 years when globalization started, we had around the same number of people working in the 1990s as we did in 1926. We had no jobs growth, net, between the foundation of the state and the 1990s. Since between the 1990s and 2007, employment doubled, and that's when we really became globalized. So I would argue that rather than killing off jobs, globalization actually grows jobs, and that's not only the case in countries with lower wages, where some of those jobs like textiles and shipbuilding go, it's everywhere. Every developed country has more people that work today than 20 years ago. So I just sort of think, I think those sort of facts are important in looking at the whole piece. Another big upside of globalization is poverty reduction. 200 years ago, a billion people lived on this planet, and almost everyone lived at subsistence levels. Now there are more than 7 billion people, and there's 500 million people living at subsistence levels, and it's falling rapidly. So not only is the share of the good world population living in real poverty falling, but in absolute numbers it's also falling. I'm not saying it's all down to globalization, but globalization is a big part of it. And there's no doubt that globalization can cause downsides. It can accelerate change. And again, just like the good things happen in the world don't happen because of all happen because of globalization, nor do the bad things. There would still be companies closing down if we didn't have globalization. That's just the nature of the economic development process. Companies grow and they decline. So the even better news is that governments have lots of policy instruments to deal with job losses of that time, with education systems, training systems, welfare systems, and these are very different countries do better on this than other countries. And I would argue that one reason why America has this Rust Belt problem more than other countries is because they don't do the kind of retraining social safety net that we do in Europe, which gets people back into work more effectively than the United States. Now, the question that we're looking at today is what role for Europe? My sense is that where should policy be done? Should it be done at the global level, at the Europe level, at the national level, at the local level? For most areas around education, training, welfare, I think it's more sensible at the national level. I'm not convinced, and I'm open to it, the case to be made, but I'm not convinced there's a huge case that we say we take our training role and we have a kind of commissioner in Brussels that sets training for everywhere. It makes total sense that we say regulate chemicals. It's crazy that we'd have 28 parliaments regulating the thousands of chemicals we use. I think it's really sensible we do that at the European level, but I'm not convinced that it's a good idea that we do education and training and welfare at the European level. I think it's a function better carried out at national level with the possible sole exception of unemployment benefit. In the Eurozone we've got a clear problem that when one part of the Eurozone goes into a deep recession, like Greece has done, that it gets into this cycle of cuts, austerity and can't get out of it. It may be a good idea to have a centralized unemployment fund so that if a country like Greece goes into a real slump, money goes from the rest of the other countries into the country with a real slump that might help to get out of that. So that's one area where I think there could be a case for a European level welfare system. Okay, interesting thoughts. Thanks for much for that, Dan. This would be the moment where I would ask Matt Carthy to give a five minute speech to you about who's responsibility it is to guard against the worst successes of globalism. Obviously he's not here, but we'll get to him in a couple of minutes so I'm afraid just for the moment where you're going to have to represent your wing of the spectrum alone, what do you make of first of all Dan's first point that ultimately a lot of the time we tend to look at globalization and we tend to think of it or at least talk about it in terms that are someone wins and someone loses, that it's a zero-sum game, when in actual fact a lot of the time as Dan has given some stats to suggest that everybody wins. Well, not everybody wins and I think just to pick up on the point about the I suppose the inherent bias of media in terms of reporting on factory closures or when there's job losses and anybody who's stood in a room where a number of people are going to lose their jobs, it's a very awful place to be because that has a profound impact on people's lives. So, you know, I think we would have often thought they're probably not an office made of when a company closes and indeed the impact on those people in the weeks and months after that. But I think one of the things that has really struck me here about the good news story with regards to employment in the US and here and across the EU over the last number of years is that yes, like in Ireland at the moment we're going through going through, you know, Dan touched on it there the second fastest period of employment growth that the state has ever had far the 96 to 2004 period. So we're going through a really fast period of employment growth and that is to be celebrated but I think we also cannot just solely focus on the quantity of jobs but it's the quality of jobs and I notice that the phrase that has been used in terms of the exaggeration of, you know, I suppose, the issues within the labor market. Well, you know, I think we've always had an issue within the labor market except we're getting more of an opportunity to try and articulate it. Now, there's one in five people in this country just short of 20% of people in this country that get up every day that face into some sort of insecure work. Now, not all of that work is low paid but it's insecure and certainly how the labor market is regulated, how well the social welfare system is equipped to be able to address and support those people to ensure that they have a decent standard of living. I think it's a real question. Is that globalization or is that just technology? Like a lot of those people who have insecure employment, they mean it's in hand with the gig economy. It's not necessarily all just to do with globalization or manufacturing jobs moving elsewhere. It's neither globalization or technology in some ways. It's new employment forms and in particular, I suppose the worst part of it is employers actually, I suppose, taking opportunity now of those who actually are willing to take up some number of hours. Like I think one of the things that has really struck me looking at the Irish data is the increase in numbers in involuntary part-time employment and the increase in numbers in full-time temporary employment over the past two decades. Overall, there has been stability in other parts of what we might call precarious work but there has been an increase and I think certainly when you see the number of people who want to take up jobs but aren't being afforded the right to take up full-time work or work that is going to give them a decent level of income. I think on the technology issue Michael touched on this. There is no doubt that the labour market as we have now is going to be dramatically transformed over the next 30 to 40 years. It's something to be embraced. We need to make our workers more resilient to be able to I suppose take up those jobs and not have the scenes that Michael talks about whereby young men in their 40s eventually never work to get. We have seen that to a certain extent through construction in this country. Men in their 50s coming out of the labour market and I think that's another thing that hasn't been spoken about here is the decline in the employment rate amongst males since the crash. Some of it is because young males are now taking up education when they didn't before but it's also older males coming out of the labour market all together. So it is about that training and that skilling, funding and ensuring that the appropriate resources are there to target those individuals. Right, okay. Matt, thanks for coming. I know that you've been a terrible worker so we appreciate that you're able to make it at all. We'll give you a couple of minutes just to catch your red before we ask you to go and give us a little overall summary. But just before we do that Michael, just to respond to one of the points that Marina made. In her opening speech she mentioned that we're in the middle of drawing up a new seven-year EU budget which will take effect from the start of the next decade and she says that she would like to see the lion's share of that go towards practical things like funds to retrain the men that you talked about who lost their jobs in the other factory and who never worked again. If we leave too much to Europe to do that then are we not actually shooting ourselves in the foot? Should we not be taking more of responsibility here at home to do that kind of thing instead of outsourcing it to European training puts? We are. And just an observation that people probably wouldn't know about the the European budget. So I went over there last I think it was October when there's a big row between the parliament and the council in relation to how the budget is is allocated for the year. That was my first time there. I was completely unaware of what happens. So the European Union is a rules-based organisation and they put in the context the quantity, the budget for the year. The budget was 165 billion euros. That's what the budget was. To put that into context the Irish national GDP Ireland in small country 5 million people was 275 billion euros. So the European Union is a rules-based organisation. It doesn't fund those areas. That's a matter for each national competence of each government. So again to put it into context 160 billion for the European Union budget for the year. The Irish budget capital and current what the Irish government spends in Ireland is 60 billion. So that isn't the European Union space. The European Union space where they've been most successful is getting the rules here to organise that Dan was talking about. So you have a European standardisation which has worked out and worked out very well. We are doing that and we've done that very successfully. We've done that successfully by when you look at going back to the crisis and at the highest point of the crisis the Irish income tax collection amount was 11 billion euros. In that same year the social protection budget in Ireland was 20 billion euros. There wasn't another jurisdiction anywhere who was paying out in income redistribution. Twice as much as they were taken in in income tax. And that's appropriate. That was what was acquired and that was done to ensure that we maintained minimum levels for people. Whether they had lost their jobs or the role of people and to fund everything else in between. And that's something it doesn't matter whether you're on the left or the right. Every party most parties in the I can speak with Irish jurisdiction we all believe in that. There isn't one of us who doesn't believe that that wasn't correct and it was correct and it was done. But in the context in 2018 the income tax take seven years later will be 21 and a half billion. This jurisdiction will almost have doubled the quantum of income tax take in seven years. What I meant about selling Ireland around the world and I say that to companies and senior executives or to other governmental representatives they are amazed that a country could double its income tax take in that short period because it wouldn't have happened practically anywhere else. Thanks for that. Matt let's give you a chance to weigh on in this. We were talking basically about the whole function of whose job is it to guard against the successes of globalization. Is it national government or is it the EU as a whole? Should the EU have to carry the can because the EU is in some ways responsible for a lot of globalization and some of the negative effects that it's brought to Ireland. As someone who is there on the front line of seeing how Ireland works with other countries every day of the week what do you think of that? Well can I start by thanking the IIEA for the invite. Apologizing for being late and saying how great it is to be finally asked to perform at the spirit store. Been waiting for the invitation for a long time Mark. There is a guitar on the back and you don't know what you're getting yourself into. Well you don't know what that would mean. But to answer your question and the fundamental and I actually taught when I got the invite that this was actually a great opportunity because for the past two years in many respects I've been articulating the positives of the European Union in response to Brexit largely as you know we campaigned for a remain vote in the North and have been working probably spending up to 50% of our time in the European Parliament actually arguing why all of Ireland actually needs to remain part of the European Union. That's not to say though that the EU is a perfect entity. In fact in many respects I believe it's fundamentally flawed and there are huge difficulties with it and I think one of the reasons why we have a lot of the challenges that we're facing politically across Europe has been the failure of the European Union to take cognizance of messages largely in response to globalization that they've been receiving from people right across Europe and on a regular basis actually alarmingly regular basis and I would argue that the European Union as it's currently constituted is responsible for the fact that we effectively have at least part fascist party leading the Italian government we have the rise of the far right all across Europe. So in terms of the responses as to whether or not it should be a national or an EU responsibility to address address the issues that arise clearly there's a responsibility for both but as someone who considers myself to be an activist I firmly believe that the most effective way and the most important way of delivering change is at a national level because that's the only place where it's ever been done the nation state was the mechanism by which a lot of the post-war progress that we've seen was delivered is where we saw and have seen real distribution of wealth equality measures the welfare state all of those things were put in place by national governments and largely and they've been undermined by the European Union as it's constituted I think what sometimes people forget is that the European treaties as they're called effectively a European constitution although we're not supposed to call that since the French and the Dutch actually rejected the very concept of that but embedded throughout that is actually a political model which makes it very difficult to change things and the Eurozone as we know creates quite a number of difficulties it limits severely governments options in terms of dealing with economic crisis as we saw over the past number of years in many ways it leads to an only option available to governments being that of what's called internal devaluation which effectively means trying to decrease and put pressure on wages and then the issue of globalization in some ways globalization has been used by political ideologues to push through measures that they couldn't actually get through national parliament so how often have we heard voters being threatened with the prospect that the markets might be like what you decide to do and therefore these markets behind the scenes and I think that's important for the context of this debate and going back to the point that I mentioned earlier on in terms of the rise of the far right because that sense of disempowerment that citizens have will find a political home somewhere and if people don't believe that the basic economic powers are going to be available to governments to enact they will look at somebody and people who are offering simple solutions and if you can't target the markets and if you can't challenge those people who are embarking on hoarding huge amounts of wealth at the expense of everybody else well then let's blame the people who are on a boat trying to escape war and famine or whatever and the case maybe so I think we're at a really defining moment in global politics but I think the only way that we in Ireland looking at it affect change in the short term is by changing our own political direction and in turn hoping that we can then play a part with progressive movements across Europe certainly and within the EU certainly but also I think it needs to be much broader than that Interesting thoughts Dan Matt thanks very much for that Dan O'Brien let you come back in on that it sounds as if from what Matt has articulated but correct me Matt if I'm wrong then that Matt is effectively blaming the EU for a lot of those ills the rise of the far right or governments that might be a little bit more authoritarian it sounds almost to a certain degree like he's setting up the EU as the fall guide where it takes all of the blame and not necessarily any of the question yeah like I think there's this long tradition of politicians blaming the EU when things go wrong and I you know I certainly you know I think there's a problem with Irish democracy it's not perfect there's a problem with European democracy it's not perfect um but you know I certainly don't think the European political structures are can explain why some countries have done very badly recently and some countries have done well like you know how is it that Ireland has recovered very strongly and Greece hasn't is that where we're both in the same currency union we're both in the same European union so you know you can't use a variable to explain a constant Michael wants to take credit for it anyway though won't he well I had politicians do I absolutely the politicians in government want to take credit for everything and politicians in opposition want to blame them for everything okay so look that's the political cut and thrust but the the you know the European union as I say it's not a perfect entity and under particular problems around the euro but again it was like the you know the Brexiteers who are argued about using the EU would suddenly allow the freedom to to export to to other countries you know Germany exports five times more to China than Britain does they're both in the same European union they both have the same rules and regulations now why is it that the Germans can sell so much to the Chinese with the same set of regulations the same rules as then Britain does again it just doesn't it's just not a lot you know you can't logically say that people who have this exactly the same rules that if suddenly those rules are in some way impinging on British exporters more than they are on on on German exporters let me let me bring Marie in that because Marie I think you're following your brows if you don't entirely buy what you're hearing no well I suppose I was actually just reflecting on something that it said about the the appropriate level of of action and I'm just thinking we wouldn't have had I suppose all our labour laws or the vast majority of our labour laws and gender equality laws if we didn't have the European Union over the past 40 years because ideally I would love that parties of the left would be able to progress that nationally but we haven't been there so actually the European you know I suppose working in concert with other like-minded parties of the European level has we've been able to bring that about um just on the the issue of I suppose the rules explaining why one country does better relative to another well at the end of the day I suppose this is the thing about the currency union that is the euro zone you know the debate has re-emerged just at the appropriateness of whether we should have a single currency and I think those who argued against it back in in in the late 90s are finding a new fund home for their views saying well you know it didn't work and Greece's the the and Italy now are the examples of that Ireland is much better than- But there's two members out of 19 though she can't say that it doesn't work on the basis of what a minority of countries experience- No but but I suppose my point is at the end of the day we're not so well integrated as you know you know the member states of the European Union that we're all going to perform similarly like Ireland is a very different economy compared with let's say Greece and in some ways there was a number of exogenous or external factors that very much benefited Ireland at a crucial time coming out of the I suppose the domestic crash which was exacerbated by the international credit downturn that meant that we were able to recover quite strongly now that's not to say that there weren't domestic factors here certainly if you look at let's say Greece very different type of economy and hasn't been able to pull itself out so you know I agree in some ways the rules can't explain why one country does well relative to another but I think the other thing is the rules have also exacerbated I suppose why some countries have done an awful lot worse and certainly if you look at again I'm thinking of the likes of Greece or indeed I suppose other countries who have persistently reached the fiscal rules and there is now a big dilemma as to you know where the fiscal I suppose system or the structure the system of rules the fiscal rules and they've been honoured more in the breach than in the acceptance or our honourance and I think that's going to be a real issue for for into the future particularly with regards to debt and the reduction of debt but the rules are much more elastic and flexible when they're breached by some member states other than than than others if Germany didn't breach the fiscal rules in the past probably wouldn't have the economy that it has today and you need to you'll recognise if you are to sell or go to part of England and outline the conditions that many German workers are operating under and that wouldn't necessarily have been an argument to would have convinced them to both remain either I actually agree with Dan on the on the point that the EU is often seen as a handy vehicle for Irish politics to blame when things go wrong and I'm not necessarily it I didn't mean just Irish politics yeah no it's a it's a particularly but it's also but it's always it's also a very and has been a very handy vehicle for Irish politicians to get things done that they would like to get done but they wouldn't like to necessarily let the Irish people know that they're getting done and one of the I'm dealing right across it's one of the big bug bears I have in terms of the issue of an Irish minister getting up and say I have no choice in this manner because Europe's making me do it now in fairness in the fence of the EU if Europe is making you do it it's because at some point or another an Irish government minister was sitting in the council behind closed doors and signed up to it and in all likelihood Irish MEPs were sitting in the European Parliament and also signed up for it and it's one of the big frustrations I have when we see things that yes the European Union files are very complicated and very convoluted of times but we're dealing with legislative files that will have a big impact on people's lives and and nobody in Ireland knows knows about it the media aren't engaged there isn't a single journalist whose job it is to cover the European Parliament then a single Irish journalist whose job it is to actually see what's going on and inform people when you consider you know the political correspondence tripping over themselves in the door and I always cite the example of at time I was down in a small village in East Galway and the local post office was being closed and it was coming up to the European elections and you'd all the sitting MEPs and then you'd all the local TVs and you'd all the local councillors and they were all getting up and saying this is a scandal that our little post offices being closed on quite rightly in terms of their position but none of them actually said that part of the reason why all these post offices are being closed including our own is a thing called the Postal Services Directive which was enacted at a European level which basically makes it illegal for governments to actually invest in post offices because they have to be seen as a commercial entity now that was agreed the Postal Services Directive by I think three different government ministers or three different parties over the lifespan of the fine all Irish MEPs at the time apart from Barbara de Broome who was from Belfast and supported it you know there was some articles where people were pointing out but yet the people who if for example there was a motion or a piece of legislation going before the doll the outworking of it was going to be the closure of the 150 or 200 local post offices you could be sure people would be aware of it you could be sure there would be thousands of people outside and TDs would make a decision one way or another they might decide that this is in the best interest but they would be doing it in the context of people were actually aware what they were doing don't deny it all that there's a democratic deficit there and that's a hook that's a talk for another time but just on some that you said there and I like if there's a point there if you want to come back on as well there is a point there though that every power Brussels has is one that either the Irish people or national governments have given to it and you can't always just use Brussels as the bogeyman because it pursues the policies that Member States sent for sure but can I just say the biggest service to Europe and the European Union over the years and decades has been anything that's good it's national partners and providers and anything that's bad it's the EU it's postals so Matt's kind of conning that into that space but he spoke about the Postal Services Directive that's essentially state aid and the state aid rules have turned out to be very good in relation to companies excuse me in relation to companies who were wounds on by the state and they have a huge advantage that the state can invest and that company doesn't have to have a commercial mandate they can trade badly have turbo or practices and anybody who's coming in to compete with them that they have an unlevel playing field so that's what happened with the Postal Services Directive so the government of Ireland even though it owns almost can't reinvest big chunks of money so that bad practices can continue in the Postal Office Network there's a difference between bad practices and they're just like bad geography good and bad job but that's but there's no recognition for the social and the social and provides like and I would have hoped that we're gone past the point of government representatives actually and arguing and the merits of privatization which is essentially what you're doing because that's not where he's going but that's that's the outworking hog hog that's not fair what I said was the Postal Service Directive has prevented governments putting money into this into the post office companies that were owned by the state and continue to trade that maybe the way they used to in the past best example of that is if you go back to people remember the post service used to be a conductor on the buses and now there isn't technology moves I mean it's we've gone beyond right that we've gone beyond the era of people just having trading the way we used to trade so the idea now that there will be a conductor on the bus collecting money is a long way far removed from the reality where we are I just make a point as well and touch upon what Matt was talking about I'm not quite sure if I if I'm mistaking what you were saying I do apologize but the criticism of the EU and the rules and everything else I think is wrong in relation to the national governments so you spoke about areas that have fallen behind more or less what you were talking about and if you you're talking about Northern England and people voting Brexit but that's nothing to do with the EU that's the UK government one of the wealthiest nations in the world choosing not to go back and retrain those areas and I touch upon what we were talking about at the very start so if you go to the areas that are falling behind whether it's the Rust Belt whether it's Northern England or Southern Italy I mean that's the national government choosing not to reinvest in education and re-skilling in the knowledge economy that it will be the future and one of the things that we have done really really well here is we've given people the opportunity to get back into employment and as Dan said he said about we're almost at the stage now where will have more people back to work than in any occasion before and one of the things that I've seen since I got into the job that I do I'm doing this for 12 months it doesn't matter which country which jurisdiction which sector or which national which senior executives that I'm dealing with the Irish workforce is a free workforce they are capable of moving they are capable of re-educating and they might go into a company and start doing a job at x or do something else that isn't available on the continent it's not available everywhere and that is testament to why we have made this success that we have and went on our aspect of it as well just going back to 2011 when the Finnegale government took over Finnegale led government with labor they absolutely understood that the model that was being pushed and accepted in some other jurisdictions by other the Georgia as such was wrong and that model was you couldn't keep cutting your way out of this we understood that the economy had to grow that's exactly what you did had to grow no it didn't that's exactly what you did we absolutely understood that it was austerity before you started re-investing the library but we did but we got rid of aspects like the the landing charge we decreased the bad rate in the hospitality sector we did so many things that brought it to a base and then we started to grow no but you you implemented an austerity agenda and the outworkings of it are evident I was listening to the news on the way down two things that have been done housing crisis health crisis both of which have been caused because of serious lack of investment over the past decade exciting but but you're wrong Matt because if you take 2018 we will spend more but I'm talking about mistakes that were made in 2011 I'll come at home to you today this year we set it back then as well 15 billion euros on health there's another seven that's coming from the private house and the public side of funding there's another seven 15 billion seven billion in the private side we spend more on health than any other jurisdiction so it's not funding absolutely no absolutely you're up and you're managing it very badly as well so I was saying this very clearly sorry this is yet to be here in the front of your stretching I don't know if you're looking for a question I was desperate for someone to take Matt's answer and Shane Bain's answer is keep taxing more and keep spending more we tried that got us into the whole we're in in the first place and Shane Bain have become the new Fina fall promise everything everybody and nobody's okay I don't doubt that they'd be very interesting route to have about the the direction of the policy well what can I just talk about the earlier point give an idea in relation to in relation to Brexit maybe we can get back to that just time for me but I do want to make sure that we do a deal with some of the the broader points and let me come back to Dan on that chief economist of the IEA and you both both yourself and Michael talked about some countries which have done better than others and some of them have tapped into the facilities that Michael mentioned the fact of the northeast of England you know which voted in large states for brexit because in some ways its own government wasn't tapping into European retraining funds that were there just cater for the likes of mishandling sorry European retraining funds those funds are available from its national governments to national budgets they just haven't gone in that direction but then should it not be the role of the EU to ensure that they do that in certain cases does that should there be a role for the EU to say well actually we know what's good for citizens here and we're not going to let domestic politics hold them up well I think we need to be careful that the amount the European Union spends with all its funds is just so tiny the amount government spends is usually about 30 to 40 times more than the EU spends so like states do three broad things they provide security for citizens they redistribute money and they regulate the EU does the regulation piece it's the environmental regulation and like Matt the reason no media has anyone in the European Parliament nobody clicks on those stories MEPs are regulating for sausages nobody cares people just don't read that stuff it's not and so many people would care if the European Parliament was regulating sausages actually I'm disappointed a few people that was right well subscription service here for all of those people hand over the cash and I'll be a little organized to get somebody over to over to Brussels but now I've lost my train of thought oh yeah so yeah the European Union just we don't give the European Union the amount of money that it would then reallocate back to poor regions that is a national decision no I lived in Italy uh for a few years the southern south of Italy was getting money from the north for decades going all the way back to the fifties and it doesn't necessarily doesn't necessarily improve the the gap between the north and south of Italy is is still as big as it was in the fifties and sixties and yet the gap between east and west Germany for example is a lot less than it used to be it's not an awful lot yes it has narrowed a bit but it's not not as much as you would have thought even though there has been a big redistribution like you know I think some areas goes just like some countries go through periods of strong growth and are successful and then they go through periods of not being so successful it's not necessarily all down to government involvement you know the truth economists have to be honest and say you know we don't fully understand economic growth so we can't be sure why one area does particularly well for a period of time there are a lot of factors going on there but the we don't even give national governments don't give the resources to Brussels that Brussels would be able to decide you're not giving enough to that particular region within your country we just don't governments haven't given Brussels that those powers we should give should national governments give Brussels those powers should I mean some people are very wary about making the EU a bigger creature than it is but evidently in some roles like this the EU doesn't have the the firepower to be able to do so and in some ways that debate about fiscal transfers within the European Union has retreated because some of I suppose this backlash against the EU project over the last number of years but in some ways if we are going to have the full workings of the monetary union then we need to have I think something more than what is there now and I'm worried of saying a fiscal union because I don't really subscribe to that either but but certainly and Dan touched on it earlier about it I suppose unemployment fund I can't remember the exact phrase you used but like I said but I think there is a role for centralising certain funds within at an EU level and then allocating to the areas most in need so in some ways you know we've had that model with regards to structural cohesion funds and there's no reason why that can't move into a different sphere but I think that requires a very serious debate about where we want the EU to go and I suppose it's just struck by the discussion there a few minutes ago about you know the EU is good bad or whatever in terms of likeism that the legislative agenda in some ways I think we've had a bit of a pick and mix attitude towards the EU because I'm just struck like as I spoke earlier about you know the gender equality legislation in terms of equal pay labour legislation which to be fair Michael's party you know in government would never have introduced so in some ways pardon well sorry but over the past three four decades like as in you know we'll give you the opportunity didn't introduce it but then on the other side of it is you know we have directives coming from let's say from Europe at the moment with regards to public procurement and the Irish government the current government has taken a very narrow interpretation of that public procurement and actually there is great potential within that those public procurement recommendations to actually insert social clauses or what's called the meet the most economically advantageous tender so moving beyond the lowest bid to actually something that is a bit better fleshed out and this government has not taken that opportunity to adopt that in its fullest sense and introduce public procurement rules which would actually benefit Irish companies all the more arguably anyway so sorry just as an interesting small poll just the idea that I put out earlier on about having the idea of a kind of centralized European fund and then you would take unemployment benefits or whatever necessary to that just as a a straw poll hands up how many people think that would be a good idea and hands up how many of you think that would be national governments losing too much power it would be make the EU too big it's very similar it's interesting do we have a moving microphone because I want to start bringing in some questions from the floor but before I do that Donald Story who's the chief economist with Eurofound has been sitting at the front taking very insidious notes the whole way through for the last hour so he is now going to be giving each of our panelists basically a grade so you'll be mentioning the pocket is the microphone there in front of you Donald what do you make of everything you've heard from the stage try and plug in some of the things just to say that I worked for the European Foundation on the improvement of everything work conditions for the EU agencies in the part of the European for the social setup doing social economic research for the European institutions so I don't know if it's on can everyone hear Donald look hey no no hey can you just hold the microphone just as close as you make Donald okay just thank you a few comments about globalization I think it is pretty clear on this broad perspective that Donald's talking about globalization essentially does create huge economic wealth there is gain with it there's also no doubt at all that there's also pain with it it doesn't benefit everybody and you know you're talking about perceptions of globalization I would say that you know people tend to have people on the street the man on the street tend to have a rather negative view of globalization on the other hand I would argue that economists and economists myself generally have had too positive an impression of globalization and that the pain of globalization is much bigger than we previously thought there's lots of very good research in the United States pre-Trump shall I say that has shown that the costs of globalization for the American Workforce have been quite appreciable of course for a country like Ireland is it's even more globalized exposed to the market global forces than perhaps any country in Europe we are what you call is our small open economy we're exposed to the risks we're exposed to the pain we're exposed to the gain and when you're exposed to risks like this what you really need is an economy a social system that can ensure against these risks and typically some of the most open economies in the world and have been for 40, 50, 60 years have been this Canadian countries and part of the reason for the development of their extensive welfare state is the insurance mechanism against the extensive globalization that they embarked upon also as someone mentioned the EU has a a rather weak mandate at for social policy and also the mandate that they have it's very very difficult to get some of the member states on board perhaps it'll be a bit more easier to get them on board when a large member who will be leaving in a couple of years with a particular often political orientation most of the social policy in the European Union is related to the single market the type of things that we're used to talking about equal treatment and so on when we have a market it's important that this competitive market to these competitions need rules and a lot of these rules to create a a level frame frame field are part of that I would wonder Matt if you were sort of mixing a little bit globalization and your organization you know it is the state I agree with you entirely that the developed post-war welfare states are one of the great achievements of the world I think we have eradicated all the age poverty in the national welfare state but we have globalization if we have to accept that we need to trade then we need multinational governance and that what EU is trying to do is to try and sort of put manners on the worst forms of global competition we have the same token I would agree with Dan that some things like training policy active labor market policy perhaps it doesn't really make sense that that's done by Brussels but certainly in this era of global giants you know an Irish industrial policy you know it's not going to work Irish competition policy we need this European framework the European Union cares about cohesion cohesion in terms of holding the union together and there's some reference to the budget a large the main part of the European budget has been in trying to get the plural member states to catch up and many of them have this country knows that the catch up has been huge and in that respect this cohesion policy has been successful what has not been successful is that in the last 20 years they've been very very strong tendencies towards inequality but within member states and largely speaking the member states have not wanted the European Union to stick its nose into that business they rightly are wrongly I think that's part of their business that's the business of the member states but actually the stability perhaps it's a little bit strange aren't you sort of half you I do in the Atlantic here in Ireland the stability of my country is very dependent on the stability of my neighbours and it's important that countries hold together that countries have this cohesive nature internally for other countries to feel stable and actually Brexit is a perfect example of that I would argue that a large reason for Brexit perhaps it's not the only one exclusive or whatever but that the huge gains made by globalisation the market economy in Britain were not shared among the people in a reasonably fair way and that was a large part of the disenchantment that the British felt and voted against the European Union rightly wrongly wrongly of course I think and that and that impacted on Ireland so actually Ireland should care about the income distribution in Britain if the stability of our country the economic prosperity of our country depends on the prosperity and the stability of our neighbours and thank you for all those points very interesting stuff probably not a yes or no question but I'm going to ask you for a yes or no answer if it's possible or you can say ish if it's not a yes or no answer are a lot of the ills that you've identified where you know individual member states are responsible for some of those problems am I doing it too simply do you think it's the case that individual EU member states are actually carrying more of the blame and more of the burden for some of those problems that you've mentioned there yes okay thank you for keeping it to a yes or no because I was worried where that was going to go right