Closing Speech by Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications and the Minister for Transport, Eamon Ryan TD, on Day 2 of the National Economic Dialogue 2021

Check against delivery

Thank you very much indeed Alan and it is a great honour to bring this NED to a close. I was just thinking to myself there isn’t it great here we are on Friday evening after a week’s work done and I’ve realised now that it’s only Tuesday.

It’s been a long week already. The highlight of it, for me anyway, was the session in NED yesterday because there’s real strength in the partnership approach that we do run in this country that we do have in this country. We’re a small country we can come together and listen to each other in a way that maybe in bigger countries would be more difficult. It gives us one of our great strengths.

I was conscious at the opening session - unfortunately I missed a lot of the events today as we were busy with the whole COVID thing, but I sense clearly the economic analysis is at the centre of it and the need for a balanced budget and the need for balance in a Keynesian way. We do in periods like this in a downturn, when the State has to step-in and replace evaporating activity – balanced in that way. And then as we grow again, which we will, to balance in the sense of seeing that growth and increases in tax income cover our increases in expenditure to be able to provide and deliver the services we need and that we keep ourselves in a budget position which gives us strength, which keeps our cost of borrowing low because we will have to do a lot of borrowing in my mind, for a variety of reasons that I am going to set out in my short contribution now. So good economics, home economics, looking after the home, looking after our home country is part of what we have to do. I am confident that we can do it.

There are three, I suppose, economic projects facing us, three economics tasks we have to manage which are going to be critical. One Minister Donohoe was on earlier, we’re very fortunate that our Minister of Finance happens to be the President of the Eurogroup at the moment, has a seat at the table with the G7 and other locations where the issue of changing tax, corporation tax systems around the world are going to be to the forefront in the next year, this year and the coming years and we will manage that. We will be able to manage that in a balanced way, in my mind, where we maintain our revenue, maintain our requirement and ability to be flexible and innovative as an island out in the north-west Atlantic and be part of international cooperation, stand up for justice, for tax justice, as well as other forms of social justice. I believe we can and will get that balance correct.

It is also important work. We are just starting the development of the new Tax Commission, Tax and Social Welfare Commission, and that’s critical work. I was involved myself previously in a Tax Commission in our last time in Government and I saw the benefit that can arise from asking a team of really good thinkers in this space to go away and consider some of the big strategic issues on how we raise revenue, how we provide social protection and to come back to Government with that strategic analysis that can really shape and frame where we go in the more medium-term – in 5, 10, 15, 20 years’ time. I think that project is hugely significant.

And thirdly and more immediately, the review of the National Development Plan. We need to do that for a variety of reasons. We need to do it to reassess our climate performance and how we are going to decarbonise our society; we need to naturally update it – it is an evolving process; and we need it because we have seen cost overruns in certain projects and have to see how can we spend our money really wisely. Part of a balanced budget is to get the most from the revenue that we do have and I think the publication of the revised National Development Plan this summer / early autumn is going to be a key moment in terms of the economic future for our country.

The government will be focusing, within that, and in a lot of its work on three areas in particular. We have to look at every area critically, but I think we’ve been upfront in saying well first and foremost we have to address housing as a priority. It is a real challenge to our younger people. I think in looking after our home, looking after our economics, we have to more than anything else start to think and prioritise the next generation. I’ve been using it as regards the climate crisis but you can apply it to any other issue or to the wider-context.

Over the last two years we have shown real attention to doing everything to protect our older people. I think coming out of the COVID-19 crisis we now do everything to set-up our young people to a secure, safe and strong community where they can thrive, where they can have a secure future: in employment, in raising their families, in loving and living in a way that allows them fulfil their life and what is ahead of them. And to do that they need a home, a secure home. And I think a significant sign of that will be the fact that the Housing for All Strategy will come in advance of the NDP Review. We’ll be giving the same sort of attention, we are now applying to climate. We have legislation for climate that allows us to do it. With the same attention we have applied in tackling Brexit and in tackling COVID-19 with our entire public service. I hope and absolutely believe in our social partners’ model, to say yes this is the challenge that we do now have to address, all in our own different way.

In that again there are various commissions, but commissions can be very useful. The establishment of the Housing Commission is going to be key. We will have our Housing for All Strategy for immediate action, because we do have to act fast. But it is absolutely appropriate at the same time to ask this Housing Commission to look strategically and think longer-term and to think outside of the box and to look at further options in terms of how we address this housing crisis. It will see new models, new ways of doing things. I think there is a fundamental change coming in not just having a kind of traditional split between social housing, rented sector, private property, private residential. To looking at new models of affordability, particularly cost rental housing which starts to mix things up, starts to create more mixed solutions in the same neighbourhood and give the security of tenure, give the lower rents particularly, give the opportunity for people to invest, give the opportunity for us to bring in private financing as well as public financing. Our balanced budget is going to come with the clever use of finance in a variety of different ways – in housing, in cost rental housing, just as much as in everywhere else.

Secondly, and it hasn’t gone away, our health crisis is going to dominate and it is not just in terms of managing COVID-19. Taking what we all sense has happened, there has been a transformation during the COVID-19 crisis. Our health system in real stress conditions, under desperate circumstances in many instances has shown incredible flexibility, incredible ability to deliver through adversity. People don’t realise, but what has happened with that cyber-attack in terms of flattening our health system IT system and we still were able to stand up and to provide the services. Everyone, Paul Reid and everyone else in the HSE, our hospitals and in our community centres deserve huge credit in my mind for the resilience they have shown. The innovation they have shown. And what we have to do now to deliver Sláintecare is to keep going with that resilience. Everyone is very tired, exhausted, everyone is flat out, stressed work wise for so long.

But what we have to do is dust ourselves down, brush ourselves off, have a good night’s sleep, rest but then get back to actually using that innovation and that capability to deliver flexibility in the public service in health. To actually deliver a new form of healthcare, to deliver on the really good policies we have for standing on good ground with the maternity policy, the mental health strategy, the various different changes we know we need to make. We all know that in our public service, the real challenge has been the speed and the need to deliver in a timely manner. We’ve learnt how to do that during COVID-19, we learnt how to use digital technology, sometimes it has taken time but it has worked, it’s worked in remote working, it’s worked in remote diagnosis. So this digital and community Sláinte healthcare type system is the prize we can now reach and achieve in this time of change.

Thirdly, and it’s not exhaustive this list of priorities, but it’s just the centre stage in this strategic change that is occurring at this time. We will deliver on our climate action plans. And we will do so because it’s our duty and obligation to protect our home in the widest sense, but also because it is going to be good for our country. It will deliver a Just Transition. And I keep coming back to the key fundamentals. The projects we need to do, they do bring social justice in their trail and have to be designed so that social justice is at their core. But when you look at the retrofitting of our housing stock we can spend a lot of time detailing what we actually achieve it and how we do it, but we’re going to have to go to every single home to address climate change and retrofit it and make it a warm comfortable home to live in. And that more than anything else is going to have a fundamental social transformation because it will eradicate and end fuel poverty. It will improve people’s public health. The public health outcomes from living in a warm, cosy, well-constructed, well-insulated home is beyond compare. It is a really good investment in social justice.

And I would say secondly, and maybe as I come from this background I’m biased, but the switching to active travel, the improving of conditions of pedestrians and cyclists and people in public transport I’ve always seen that as a social gain. A lot of people cannot afford to drive a car. There is nothing wrong with someone who has a car and I drive myself - we can’t do a ‘them’ and ‘us’ in this, but there is a fundamental truth that by investing in modes like walking and cycling and public transport we improve our health, again it tends to favour those on lower incomes and again it favours those who maybe don’t have the option be it through a disability or a whole variety of different reasons. It is a social transformation.

Two other points on it. Firstly, we had a really interesting session yesterday with representatives from the ICA, Macra, ICMSA and a whole range of different agricultural interests rightly looking at, focusing on this climate issue because it is their future. It is their incomes that are at stake. It is their livelihoods that we are talking about. And we’re listening. Climate won’t work if it is top down, waving a finger at someone to tell them what to do. It’ll work when it’s working together, listening to each other, admitting we don’t know all of the solutions yet, we’ll have to learn by doing and social partnership and these types of events – our National Economic Dialogue – and the future dialogues we are going to hold to deliver on this transition is going to be central. It won’t work if we don’t have public support behind the change. It won’t work if they don’t trust that it is actually going to lead to a better outcome. The strangest thing possible – we have to hasten slowly in doing this; we have to stop and listen and share best ideas; and we will do that in the coming months. This event today in my mind is only the first of many events we are going to do through our social dialogue process to actually deliver the climate change targets we have.

Lastly, this is thinking big on the climate side, it is also transformational on the economic side. It is the biggest economic opportunity that our State has ever seen because we happen to live with a sea area seven times our land area in the windiest place on the planet. We can convert that energy into hydrogen, into ammonia, and into electricity which would power industry into the future. That’s the best, most secure guarantee of a balanced budget in the decades to come. That will give us the power to run digital industries that are going to be a future employer in this country. It gives us the ability to actually develop the periphery – to develop the west, the north-west, the south-west, east – not just our cities but right across the country.

And it is not going to be easy. Public support and getting the planning right and getting the investment conditions right is going to be really challenging but I don’t see anything that should stop us. And in transitions in the past – the one we did in the late 50s/early 60s moving from being a closed economy to an open economy – the one we did getting out of the economic crisis in the late 80s – and I would argue the financial crash of 2009-10 – in all three occasions in my living memory, just about, we have done it well when we worked together, when we listened to each other and came together and actually realised it is employers and unions and the social pillar and the environmental pillar working together. That’s why I believe in this economic dialogue process – in our social partnership process – and in why I enjoy working with all the parties in the Dáil and particularly with our government colleagues to make it happen.

It’s not Friday, it’s just Tuesday but I hope everyone has a good week, enjoys the sunshine and stays safe.

Thank you.