 Welcome everybody, on behalf of the Institute and also the Commission of Representation here, we're hosting this event today. It's become an annual event focusing on the specific recommendations around the broader European semester piece. It all leads into helping to improve the quality of policymaking and its implementation. Something particularly important, I think, for smaller companies like Ireland who have certainly had a world rollercoaster, our economic history over the past number of decades has been something of a rollercoaster. A lot about we can't influence, but the things we can influence are things here at home in the domestic policy space. We're good to have ideas and thoughts coming from outsiders to give a fresh perspective on all of that. So without further ado, we have two good keynote speakers today. Let me hand over to our first speaker of the Minister, Regina Darlan. Thank you everybody for the invitation to speak here today. I think it's fair to say that the Institute has a very strong track record of providing a very valuable platform of exchange ideas in Europe. So just last year the IAEA published a study accepting the impact of the country's specific recommendations which are now accepting from the forum today's seminar. I want to welcome the initiative teaming up to your commission today to continue to raise the profile of the renewed, frankly, social Europe. I'd also like to take the opportunity to welcome the Director-gen used court to Ireland. It's not his first visit, I'm told, but I hope they won't be his last. And so he's only in his role since March. He's shown in our discussions today to be exceptionally open and engaging in the voice on progressing social and employment policies, not just in Ireland, but across the EU. The country's specific recommendations as part of the semester process have now been used in the EU level since 2011 and in Ireland since 2014. And the process has certainly evolved over the years with changes to the annual timelines given to Member States, and it gives a greater opportunity to discuss the commission's proposals. I think in addition the commission has come to understand the profound policy change that a national level can take significantly longer than the 12 to 18 months winter that was originally envisaged under the CSO process. I think the process is not a perfect one. There's no Member State that's fully implementing each and every recommendation, but the record does show that the commission and the Member States have learned lessons from the European semester process and adjusted each of our own processes accordingly. And this has led to Ireland and other Member States committing to a cycle of continuous and ongoing reforms that we all believe are necessary to ensure that the European Union remains relevant in people's lives from a social perspective while continuing to drive economic prosperity in all of our states. The semester process has genuine strong support in Ireland. The process benefits greatly from the two-way dialogue to view the shared analysis and understanding of all of the ideas that we discussed with each other. And we believe that this dialogue with Member States is essential and will continue to improve both the quality and the implementation of each and every recommendation. One aspect of the semester process that tends to get overlooked by those looking in from the outside is the capacity of Member States to learn from each other. And I think both our successes and equally our mistakes are as important as each other to learn from each other. Our exchanges of best practices, of policy innovations, I think sometimes they're hard to quantify and therefore sometimes they're easy to dismiss I think consequential. But nonetheless I think they're a valuable learning tool for a national administration in an increasingly complex social policy environment. Last year's IIE report on the CSR's recognized the increased deficits in recent years on the CSR's relating to social employment issues which is my own brief. And I think some commentators have suggested that the early years of the semester process involved the absorption of social policy into macroeconomic policies. I think it's now fair to say that we're witnessing a correction. And this ties into President Junker's renewed bigger and promoting social Europe where as he has stated we have a common understanding of what is socially fair in our single market. I'd like to turn to the 2018 CSR's for Ireland. They were published on the 23rd of May and these recommendations are discussed and being dissected by Member States officials in the Commission as we meet here today at this very moment. And I'll be joining with my ministerial colleagues in Luxembourg later on this month at the Esco Ministerial Meeting to debate but ultimately to decide and endorse all Member States employment and social CSR's. Ireland's economic recovery I think is mirrored in the chain of CSR's from year to year. So four years ago Ireland, we had just ex-Mr Trocott programme. We just joined the mainstream semester process. And I think the emphasis of the social and employment CSR's directed at Ireland then were on labour activation and rightly so we need it particularly around our long-term employed sector. But more recently the emphasis has shifted to a policy where the changes broadly agree with the tone and the substance of what the Commission are trying to implement in their proposals which highlight the important issues that we recognise as priorities in this area of correction. And these include transfer, they include housing, they include digital skills, all very, very large and relevant issues that we're experiencing here in Ireland. While each are important policy goals in themselves, the inclusion of the semester process relates to how improvements in each can create the context for sustainable employment in roads and social inclusion which I think is likely important. So I want to welcome the recognition by the commission as expressed in its recycling this year CSR's that Ireland's social protection and taxation systems are very effective in curtailing poverty and inequality. Equally I want to welcome the challenges that existing Irish policies in such areas of social inclusion and childcare bring to our conversations because this type of external scrutiny forces policy makers and there's lots of us that we all have impacts in it, it forces us to justify and to re-evaluate existing policies and I actually think that's a really good thing. I'd like to say that there's a word here about the role of our social partners in the process. There are several for exist in Ireland for ready free consultations with our social partners and a lot of them happen to come from my own department and they include from past those perspectives the National Economic Council, the Labour Employment Economic Forum but in my own department we have our pre-budget forum every year which last year was my first which was incredibly valuable in actually listening not even just on a one-to-one perspective but reflecting the shared view across a number of bodies and it genuinely did feed and I hope you'll agree with me that it did feed into some of the changes that were made with regard to last year's budgetary process. The CSRs do not of course exist in a policy vacuum. In recent years Member States and the Commission have worked together to raise the profile of social employment initiatives that ultimately improves every single citizen in the EU their lives but it reminds Europeans that there's more to Europe than what we've been consistently listening to for the last number of years of austerity and excessive deficit procedures. It's lovely now to actually be talking about social policy progression about improving people's lives, about the work life balance about improving employment rights. The European pillar of social rights has led the way on promoting a renewed social Europe and I have to say we absolutely thoroughly support the pillar about the process, publishing its own comprehensive response to the commission's consultation. I think it's fair to say playing a leading role in the EU and ensuring the proclamation of the pillar of social rights while the document Member States could stand over it and work with the commission to implement it and we don't have long left in this commission so I think we have to work incredibly hard and smart over the coming months to make sure that we do implement it fully. I had the privilege of going to Sweden on Christmas to accompany the Taoiseach and to meet all of the other world of our EU leaders that were there where the proclamation of the pillar of social rights was declared and adopted and those political commitments were made with 20 distinct social and employment policy areas on the three broad categories of equal opportunities and access to the labour market, fair working conditions and the social protection and inclusions for all of our citizens were adopted and I think the emphasis in Gothenburg was from learning from each other's experiences and using the proclamations as a guide for awkward convergence. The history of the European Union is littered with proclamations that once declared are often forgotten but actually I think since last November and we have a monthly meeting obviously another less informal or more informal meetings during the process. It has been on the agenda every single one since last November. I think the emphasis has shifted very distinctly to the implementation of the pillar. Our own Taoiseach has discussed the potential of the EU counterpart at two EU council meetings and I as I said have had discussions at every single council meeting that we've had at EPSCO every single month since last November. I think the implementation of the social pillar is happening. It's going to happen. We all recognise that it's something that we want and we're all going in the same direction but we do genuinely respect and reflect that not every EU country's economy is the same as their neighbour. There are some economies that have more buoyancy than others but we all want to make sure that we get to the same destination at the same time. I think the commission has also worked to implement the social pillar into the semester process this year including through the country's specific recommendations which is very, very welcome because indeed there are several policy areas where the commission has not brought forward proposals for recommendations or a directive but it has genuinely proven and chosen to advance the pillar through the specifically targeted CSRs as appropriate for member states and I think that's really, it shows a sign that the commissioner is absolutely intent on ensuring that we recognise Europe as a socially inclusive organisation and group of states as opposed to just an economic and trade group. I'd like to say more recently last March the commissioner launched the social fairness package. Through distinct from the social pillar it's an underlying justification of the same and the objectives of the same because it's going to give impetus to a new social Europe and recognise that there are some European states that don't have the same buoyancy as I just talked about and others do and in addition to enhancing access to social protection the package aims to process a new European labour strategy which aims to streamline current initiatives and enhance cooperation between all of our member states and whilst discussions between the member states are still at a very early stage and I think we're all trying to kind of suss each other out Ireland very much welcomes the proposal but we look forward to ensuring it does become an instrument that helps insurers, workers rights and employees rights across EU, international and international borders in a way that we treat all workers fair and in a just manner. All these fine initiatives and the CSRs wouldn't get very far without money. I think the CSRs are overwhelmingly financed by member states and the commissioner has grown to understand that increasing funding and the capacity to absorb that funding can take time. The EU funding is also required to make sure that the European social idea is meaningful and it's not just a concept. As negotiations get underway on the multi-annual financial framework I think we fully realise that social policies much fight and compete with other policies but we need to fight to make sure that we get adequate funding for the seven years post 2020. The commission launches proposals on the 2nd of May and it highlighted my quote strengthening the social dimension of the union including through the full implementation of the European pillar of social rights and I very much welcome the commissioners ambition and I'm going to support it for as long as I'm here and the director juiced here in their efforts to secure the necessary opportunity to underpin the development and the maintenance of the key social and employment level policies at the EU level. And finally before the director general speaks I want to commend the commission in partnering with its member states and adopting what is actually a flexible approach to the semester process because we are committing to implementing incremental improvements in the CSR process and working with Ireland towards the common goals and social fairness. I believe that the integration of the European pillar of social rights into the CSR process this year demonstrates a continuing capacity for innovation and adaptation in the EU semester. The years ahead include significant challenges in relation to the EU budgets and social policy instruments but well established commitments to continuous reform and a firm vision that is laid down in the social pillar I think is an excellent basis for moving forward. And our second keynote speaker is Joost Corte, I hope I've got the answer reasonably okay. He is the top civil servant in the European Commission's Director General for Employment Social Affairs. The minister here ladies and gentlemen it's a real pleasure to be here this afternoon at the institute to discuss the latest developments in Brussels in the area of social Europe as the president always calls it and in particular to discuss with you the latest proposals for countries specific recommendations that have been put forward by the Commission on the 23rd of May the minister already referred to it. It's an important week, weeks not only on the 23rd of May there were the proposals for the CSRs, countries specific recommendations but this week we see the adoption of the Commission's proposals for cohesion funds for the next MFF for the next 19th and we'll find those framework and I think as we speak today Commissioner Phil Hogan is presenting the proposals for the common agricultural policy and of course all these initiatives will have a very considerable impact online and I think therefore important to reflect a bit on what's happening. I think to start with the European selection the catch phrase of President Juncker which he used in the State of the Union in September of last year was that we should fix the roof while the sun is shining and I think this captures rather well the whole concept of this year's semester package and it means that we've had a very favorable economic situation at the moment, you're being approached the economy is growing at its fastest pace since the decade and this means that we now have an opportunity to do some urgent structural reforms that have basically been actually neglected for very good reasons because we're in the deep financial and economic crisis and I don't have to say this here without even know much better what that means, but it does mean that the package of this year and the country's particular combination do have a very different failure. There are much more forward-looking also it will take me a slightly longer time span of 2 by 12 to 18 months for its implementation and they look a lot less backwards in issues like lack of issues of crisis so let's use this positive economic plan at the moment to do these necessary repairs, also because it may not last in the positive economic situation. I don't have to mention Brexit and it's potentially back here, we also have to deal with President Trump and he's doing this with a very well impact on the economic situation in Europe, then with the situation in Italy and in other parts of the European Union which are also about the impact on the growth of the package. I would like to say also and pick up on the minister said on the way Mr. Packings this year this European semester package was prepared by the Commission and very close cooperation with the member states and also very close cooperation with the social partners at the European level but more importantly I think at the national level and this means that probably this year's package will be quite peaceful if I may say so, my first indication from the process in the Council where all these recommendations are obviously true tonight and they have to be true. It goes quite well and I think it just means that the preparations were good and that we hopefully have found together with the United States the social partners the right balance of the recommendations that are useful. It's not beyond the recommendations of us, they are done of course to help the government in the countries to do the things that they probably would like to do anyway and which helps them to make a focus, to better put a better focus on the real person. By and large it's also meant that the number of citizens has come down quite a bit. I think by about 9% across the European Union that they have become a lot more focused and what is also important is that if you look at the policy that the recommendations are targeting basically there are more on the social Europe. This is a surprise though, of course it's not a surprise because Canada has been installed in the United Kingdom last year the European Council of Social Rights was declared solving the Gothenburg and hence the European Commission has taken that into account and we have to have an impact on the way we incorporate the principles of the Phillipine to this rest. This has been done I think quite clear and you will see this back also in your own kind of specific representation. So I think the process in Ireland has been very good and all stakeholders, notably the social and civil society have really helped a lot in coming up with good proposals. Let me then also say turn a bit into the specific recommendations that you will find for Ireland this year. There's one on childcare and there's one on digital skills. Those are the two of more CSRs for Ireland but I would like to move myself here to the ones for which I'm particularly responsible for the social and civil area and then two. One is on childcare and the other is on digital skills. I am also of course, all that I would say is done against a very favorable background because the economy looks much better than I do in the world. You are doing better than others in terms of employment and also in terms of many of the other indicators that you see in the social scoreboard which is a very useful document and it's through the social scoreboard which you can find of course on the Internet that we in a way assess all the member states in the course of the principles of the social community. So that is also a helpful tool to translate these principles of the social good that everybody can sign up to. But it gets interesting, as the minister said, when we start comparing the principles, how they actually perform against each another of these principles. How we are motivating the states in an area where the commission has very few components to be motivated to move upwards together. That's really our objective. Let me briefly speak about the two recommendations. Affordable quality childcare, the first one and the second one is digital upskilling. Accessibility to affordable full-time quality childcare is very difficult and it's the most expensive one in this country in the whole of the youth community according to studies done by the OEC for those parents. And it's the second most expensive one for couples in the whole of the youth community. So that is a kind of a fact. And of course these factors do have a negative impact on women's employment which stood 65.4% in 2016. Now we know of course also and this is also newly certified through the country report and through the country specific recommendation and the IRS closes that a single affordable childcare scheme was approved here in December 2017. This is an important initiative that should now be very swiftly implemented. There was already a recommendation last year for affordable childcare. There's another one this year but I think you will see that the formulation is more optimistic because the business piece of legislation that is now adopted. And also the measures to attract more workers to the sector, the workers to actually do the childcare deserve praise. But workers must be sustained to court with demographic pressures from very high birth rates. I think IRA is among the highest birth rates that in the European Union. So this is why we felt it was important to maintain the CSR on the own childcare. Secondly, this is the skills. Skills is a thing if you look again more horizontally at all of those things, on 27 of our success. Grease is not assessed because that's a different program. But normally we will take grease over again next year. The skills show for this and the lack of well educated students coming out of university schools is an issue that is we find everywhere. It's really the priority of all priorities I think in the area of social policies in the European Union. And it's also an issue here because despite the very good employment creation record in Ireland differences in employment rates of low, medium and high skilled workers remain among the highest in the European Union. And there is a feeling that this has to do with the lack of digital skills from our certain quarters of the employment force. Ireland still has one of the lowest levels of people of working age with basic digital skills in the European Union. It's actually 48 percent. The EU average is 59 percent in the UK in 71 and in my own country in the Netherlands it's 79. This is very strange. This is not at all what you would normally think of in Ireland where the working force basically doesn't have sufficient digital basic skills. But apparently these facts are as they are. And hence again I think the full harmony with everybody here, we thought that this is where you need a push. And therefore we thought it was perfect to issue a CSR on the need to upskill your ideal population in relation to digital skills. Now the next steps will be, as I said this is all going through the council at the moment. From the various committees, it will go to the council in June, the EPSCO council and then ultimately it will be approved by the European council at the end of June. And then of course the implementation process. What's more important to me is what's happening in Brussels. It's about the implementation of course that this is all done. And we will then come back to progress again in the next year's cycle. Finally a few words about the other issues that were brought forward in the last few weeks in Brussels, particularly on the fundamental financial framework. Of course what is particularly relevant for us here in Brussels is that the ESF plus regulation was put forward yesterday. The day before yesterday, sorry, on the 30th of May, as well as the European Globalization Adjustment Fund. And I'll give you a bit of the time on this because it is important and it has to do again with the social Europe and with the development of the social pillar to the fundamental side. You know of course that the EU budget will be very difficult this time around. A very big member state is going to certainly leave us. And this means that we'll be needing millions, 15% of its GDP and the big net continues on. At the same time the challenges are part of that. The world has become a much more dangerous place than it was when this MFF started. And Hans Commissioner has been looking for reasonable compromise between those two in the sense of a budget that is ambitious but still should be acceptable for the member states and the diversion of the funds towards new priorities. And that is what you will find in the MFF proposal which is quite a lot. I've seen a lot of these MFFs passing by and I do think this time around it is actually very different. It is very different in particular because it is a lot more flexible. The commission proposes to make it much easier for member states to channel money from the waterfront in order to be able to respond quicker to unexpected events. And of course this is largely driven by our experience from the public crisis and also from the magnitude crisis where it was extremely hard and difficult to strictly respond even though the funds are there. But once they've been programmed it's very hard to channel to other maybe more priority tasks. We've introduced some mechanisms in this proposal that we hope members of the member states will of course endorse. So what we've done is put forward a regulation which would be called the European Social Fund Plus. Why is it called the Plus? Because in fact it also incorporates three other regulations that are currently to accept. One regulation which will have the Youth Employment Initiative, the ESF itself of course and then the Youth Employment Initiative, the European Fund for the Most Deprived, the Employment and Social Innovation Program as well as the EU Health Program. That is why it's called the ESF Plus. And of course the ESF Plus is part of the Cohesion Amendment and therefore there are strong links between this fund and the Cohesion Fund and the European Regional Fund but also with the USMOS and the European Solidarity Corp to achieve all the objectives in a harmonized and logical way. And again here you will see that the flexibility between different funds has been enhanced substantially. I think up to 5% of each of these funds can be removed around by member states. If we look at the size of the social fund it is 100 billion euros. This is the proposal that we made which is about 27% of the total Cohesion Enfield which is more than is today because today is 23. And again this is just a proof that social Europe and the social appeal of social rights has taken seriously by definition. Of course all of this still needs to be approved. 27% for the social fund in comparison to the other Cohesion Funds it's interesting to see that in Ireland of your total Cohesion Enfield you spend 61% on the social fund. I think Ireland is actually the highest so there is only 39% going to the regional fund. In other member states you see very different. Ireland has definitely already put in emphasis very nicely on the social dimension of the Cohesion Funds. So I think this is all I wanted to say by the way of introduction here. I very much hope again that from our point of view the Synecropose has been an extremely successful one. I'm very happy and I heard also today that when the council so far there hasn't been any discussion about the Irish recommendations. So that means that the Cohesion Fund has really worked very well. And we very much hope of course with the money with the legislation that we have information to come forward. And with the first proposal that we do actually really help Ireland to overcome its remaining shortages. Thank you. Thank you very much. We now have two representatives from the social partners to respond and add other their thoughts to it. So let me kick off with Marie-Sharah and Steve. And thanks very much for the invite here today. I want to kind of combine my kind of two sets of comments. The first I said we need very much to the fiscal strategy for some of the recommendations that have been set out in the CSR. And I think some of those recommendations very much will be linked to what we might call it. Certainly I think from such as that our students are very much welcome. The particular focus and some of the key obstacles to increase such as important childcare provision housing, public primary healthcare, and pensions. And certainly that focus in the report is very welcome. I think the other thing to say is that while we you know for many years the agenda has been dominated by one surrounding the fiscal discipline and fiscal rules certainly very much welcomed the shift in attention now to the social agenda. But of course at the heart of all this discussion has to be a discussion about the fiscal strategy and how we pay for all that. Because of course unless we have the money then this conversation is doomed to go around circles as it has for the past two decades about childcare, about health, about education in this country and not make much progress. I suppose to acknowledge just some of the detail that the European Commission has set out. So you know the Highlight Constraints Funding for Market Practices based on insufficient childcare support, the shortage of access to housing, and the negatives fell over to employability, productivity, and of course to well being from not having that dependable roof over the head. The lack of capacity for the primary community healthcare system to meet the unmet need and growing needs that we're going to have over the next decade. And of course that growing polarization in terms of skills within the existing labour force here in Ireland. And I suppose increasing concern with the right labour market resilience of certain cohorts in the labour market in being able to respond to the jobs of the future and the challenges that we're going to present in the labour market over the coming decades. So all that is very welcome. But I suppose what I'm here today because I suppose to very much reflect a domestic concern which is about how we pay for that. And there's two fundamental problems. Firstly in the context of the government's own fiscal strategy of planned structural budget services over the medium term. And of course tax cuts being too big part of that. It's not clear to me how we can accommodate these structural changes in public expenditure. And I suppose what I've been spoken about here are not incremental changes to public services. It's actually a shift in an increase in public services. So within health for instance, a move into primary community care on a universal basis. Child care at the moment is supported only for a certain number of families in this country. I suppose significant childcare support is only for a small number of families. And we're to greatly broaden that from this one having a shift to level increase in childcare support. And certainly in terms of education, we know that there's a huge issue to get out of current level funding. So if we are to deliver on that then we need to have, I suppose as I would see it, a change within the strategy has been articulated over the past two years by the specific government. We have an opportunity now to deliver and within the fiscal rules that expansion of public services. But I'm not saying at the moment in terms of what's being articulated. Particularly with regards to budget 2019. I think the second thing to say is that we need to also think about how we plan for these changes and certainly we're going to waste the notion of multi-annual planning plans for capital expenditure. Of course we had the publication of the National Development Plan just last month. But with regards to current expenditure we've never had that multi-annual thinking. Yes we have the ceilings but I suppose that only allows for incremental small scale increases. We haven't had the multi-annual plans to be able to think about how do we actually roll out changes in health or in education or in child care or in housing. And certainly when we think about trying to bring with all that change within I suppose the next decade which is a short period of time that's an enormous amount of change and certainly Wiser hits that I around here may well remember a time when we had a period of change and so many fronts in previous decades certainly in my early memory we haven't had that. But if we are to deliver change over the next decade in some of these areas then we're going to need to keep very carefully with how we deliver that within the fiscal constraints that we have though but also I suppose utilising the fiscal opportunities as we now have them. I think the second issue that I just want to touch on is the relationship between fiscal sustainability of our public services and the health of the labour market and that's very much the heart of what is being spoken about with the CSRs because if we think about it in order to ensure the sustainability of our public finances we need a very strong labour market and to me nowhere is this more evident than in the issue of pensions because if we at the moment we understand that we are going to have a significant issue with regard to sustainability and pension abilities of the state over the coming decades and I suppose it's very conventional or what has been conventional to many western European countries and indeed Ireland is to increase the pension age and Ireland is going to have the highest pension age across advanced cultural countries by 2028 but as I think we all agree there is a limit to how many times we can increase the pension age and we need to start thinking about other more innovative ways of ensuring the sustainability the fiscal sustainability of our pension and our abilities in the coming decades and for me certainly a key thing that we need to look at is the employment rate because obviously if we have more people at work and a higher share of the working age population at work then we are in a much better position to be able to sustain the pension system over the coming decades and as we know our employment rate relative to other EU member states is certainly below what it should be I think there is a great focus and rightly so on female labour market participation and the fall-off after the age of 5 is certainly related to the childcare issues and other issues I think spoken about here but I think we all need to be more male employment and arguably there has been a permanent reduction in the male employment rate for a good reason because there is more young men now going into education but it certainly exposes an issue there that our employment rate needs to be higher for both men and women and we need to think about as those initiatives specific to male living as to approve that over the coming years if we are to improve to ensure that there is a greater number of people at work to sustain our higher dependency ratio in the coming decades I just want to conclude just on the broad issue of the labour market I suppose with the exception of the late 90s and early 2000s we are going through the fastest period of employment growth in the history of the state and that certainly very much be welcomed but I think thankfully we are moving from a just talking about the number of people at work to the quantity of jobs now and that has been touched upon in the CSRs with regards to the work intensity of some households we know that there is slightly well I suppose it's within the context of quality work but we know that there is just over 1 in 5 people in this country who wake up at work, wake up every morning in terms of job insecurity. A smaller number as those we could define if we prepared is 175,000 but nonetheless a very significant number in terms of actually how we ensure that those people have a decedent to be able to sustain themselves and their families into the future and I suppose I just want to acknowledge the efforts of the ministers department in terms of the employment provision still which is currently being worked at and of course I suppose the Irish Conference of Trade Union is indeed my own union sent to and landed having I suppose an input are certainly making their views very clear with regards to that legislation we look forward to further progress on that but I suppose certainly this is something that we are going to have to watch very carefully with regards to precarious work that is not as big an issue here in Ireland as it is in other countries presumably we are going to follow other EU member state trends so I think that legislation would be certainly very important the last thing to say is that the European Union in particular has played a huge part in terms of the gender quality in this country over the past 4 decades and I suppose looking to the future I think it can have a very real impact on reducing gender inequality and in particular the gender pay gap in this country and I think what often we focus on child care is being one of the chief features of the gender pay gap but we know it's only one feature so we spoke about child care today but I think there's two other things the second is in terms of pay transparency and I think certainly EU can bring in a lot more pressure and encouragement to bear on countries like Ireland to improve pay transparency because I think that will have a very significant impact on reducing the gender pay gap because we know as women progress through the labour market in terms of how they in terms of rising up the career ladder the pay increases are less relative to what men get when they are promoted and the last thing is to progress to fair work on issues and I suppose certainly it's something that we're delighted to see in terms of the proposals to progress the EU labour authority and the other proposals for fair work and that will certainly have a real impact on women at work because we know that there's more women than men in lower paid sectors in more precarious work and more vulnerable in the workplace so thank you Marie, our final world panelist is Tommy Donnelly the head of education and social policy at the employer's organisation, I think Thanks very much Dan and thanks for the opportunity to add our thoughts to this discussion the CSR has got three groups of recommendations I suppose we broadly agree with the thrust of them that's because we have different emphasis on some of the priorities there is a lot of material on the need for Ireland to accelerate its debt reduction, we would actually argue that in terms of expenditure the fundamentals of the economy are very sound at the moment and it's important to address those rapidly emerging bottlenecks like labour, skills housing etc and we do have the opportunity the recommendations also talk about the time implementation of the national development plan and projects Ireland 2014, again we think that's where the emphasis of expenditure should be but today we're really looking around the social aspects of the CSR I'm just going to look at four main areas very quickly one is that of lifelong learning, upskilling and digital skills so the digital skills feel a bit counter-intuitive to me, I don't understand why we're so able to sync particularly with the UK where we share a lot of cultural differences but a group that I'm involved with the expert group on future skills needs will be looking at that and trying to understand that a bit more we do have an issue around lifelong learning rates which are low and I think the challenge here is to actually create the demand the demand amongst employees and citizens but also amongst employers and a key to that is how we use the national expenditure the national training fund which employers pay into indeed their contribution increased in the last budget and is due to increase in the next two budgets we know that some of that money is used on things like apprenticeships which we're very much in favour of but there's vast quantities of that 500 million fund which we're not really clear on the outcomes from there's a review of that at the moment and we'd like to see that brought to fruition because those skill gaps are developing to wider leg market shortages Marie also mentioned pensions and the government on Monday launched its pensions roadmap which the minister declared a passion for pensions I'm the other person in the room who's got a passion for pensions probably because I'm a bit closer to market but I think it's a very good document I think the five strands of it the first strand was launched on Monday and that's around this total contributions approach which I think instinctively feels the right thing to do it seems more equitable there's been a lot of coverage to that probably the most challenging aspect of this pensions roadmap is the introduction of a auto-enrolled occupational pension scheme at the moment only 35% of workers actually have private occupational pensions that is a serious issue with an outlier in the OECD in that regard but a lot of very careful planning and design will need to go into coming up with a system that has the confidence of both employers who have signed up in principle to contribute into it and also employees and the governments thankfully because there's a danger in these sort of processes that interdepartmental committees can hand down the design of these programs thankfully there's been a proposal that this would be part of the deliberations of the Labour Employee Economic Forum incidentally other areas that it's looking at or will look at are housing childcare and employment rights it's nice to see social dialogue which is so much a European concept is beginning to return albeit in a nascent way into Ireland it's something that was very much out of favour during the crisis and probably on fairly blame for some of our rules so it's good to have a structure where employees and employers who have the best of interest in this have a direct say in the governments and the design of this program childcare has been talked about a lot just to say everybody knows the reasons why childcare is so important in terms amongst a whole range of issues, labour markets, participation for females but this has to be paid for and it's very comprehensive and the commissioner of point today and the document point said that we've got the second most expensive childcare for couples and the first for lone parents in the EU we've also got the highest rate of cash transfers in terms of the child benefit in the EU so sorry we're second to Luxembourg so we can't have both it's quite simple we can't have high rates of child benefits and well designed childcare provision and it was lazy policy making that chose the cash transfer route in the past and some of those, some of the unintended consequences we've got 330 million for example going to households with income of over 100,000 a year and we could make significant savings if we means tested the child benefits something that politicians are very adverse to even consider and invest that into childcare provision housing, very complex issue, I'll just say that we need 36,000 units on average up to 2046 this speaks at 56,000, we built 17,000 last year this is very complicated around cost of development land site value tax, our planning system investment incentives for landlords, disconnections between government departments but it's probably the issue that our member companies speak about more than anything else I want to end this urgent commission to revisit a notion that was very popular back in 2008 before the crisis hit and that's the one of flex security this idea that we invest in people rather than jobs that may become redundant due to demographics, due to technology, due to globalization, a whole range of factors, we know that there's such a churn in the jobs markets we might not like aspects of it, it's a reality though, so we need to invest in people, we need to look at this future workplace and we need to come up with the social protection systems that ease these transitions, we also need to invest heavily in lifelong learning so that people can reskill as they move from job to job and I would suggest that that is probably a more constructive way of approaching this whole issue of so-called precarious employment and rather than some of the broadly we support the social pillar but it also contains seven new directives, we've already got 70 directives covering the employment relationship emanated from Europe, we've got 14 bills making their way through the eroptus as we speak around the employment relationship I don't think regulation is going to solve this issue we need to acknowledge the realities and put together a new framework which is suitable for that workplace in the future, thank you