Speech by Minister for Social Protection Leo Varadkar to Dublin Chamber of Commerce

Intercontinental Hotel, Ballsbridge, Wednesday 14th December

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President, Council Members, Chamber members, staff, distinguished guests. Good morning.

I want to thank the Chamber for asking me to speak to you this morning. Before I start, I want to acknowledge on behalf of the Government and the citizens of our city, the important and valuable role that the Chamber plays in our civic life. You started life as a most respectable meeting of merchants. You remain that today but you have become much more. You are the voice of business in Dublin. You are learners and leaders. You are ambassadors elsewhere and overseas. It has been a pleasure and privilege to work alongside the Chamber in opposition and in Government. It’s a relationship I value and one I hope we can build on in the years to come.

There are many things I could speak about today including the many challenges facing Government.

These include the need to manage our public finances carefully, challenges in industrial relations, preparing for Brexit and the new relationship with Britain and Europe which it will necessitate. But in the time I have, I want to talk about just two things – my Department, the Department of Social Protection and how it relates to you and your businesses and some thoughts about Dublin, our city, and how I imagine it could be.

I think to some people, the Department of Social Protection can be a bit of a mystery, particularly to the very many people who think I am still Minister for Health! Some mistake the Department as little more than a ‘big computer’ responsible for making payments to the unemployed.

It is, of course, very much more than that. It is the largest Department in Government with 6,000 civil servants and a budget of almost €20bn. We are responsible for weekly and monthly payments to more than 1.5 million individuals and families with more than half of our payments going to pensioners and children. We also provide income support to another 800,000 thousand people with disabilities, carers, one-parent families and jobseekers.

We run the social insurance system into which employers’ and employees’ PRSI is paid which in turn funds maternity benefits, sick pay, illness benefits, contributory state pensions, treatment benefits, and since September, paternity benefit as well.

This year the Social Insurance Fund will return to surplus for the first time in eight years. And I intend to keep it that way. We also provide the public employment service, Intreo, tasked with getting people off welfare and into work, education, training or self-employment. And, we have overall responsibility for pension policy. Something I intend to focus on in 2017 and I will talk to you about again in more detail.

While you might not know it, everyone in this room will receive hundreds of payments from my Department in the course of their life from child benefit to the state pension and every contingency in between – maternity, paternity, illness, unemployment even redundancy. Also, my Department impacts on households and people’s lives like no other.

So let’s talk about Dublin, last month Alexander Garvin, a professor of urban planning at Yale University, published a book entitled ‘What makes a great city?’ It should be required reading for anyone interested in ensuring Dublin develops in the right way. Garvin recognises that every great city must be a ‘dynamic, constantly changing place that residents and leaders can reshape’, to satisfy changing demands.

Central to that is the importance of the public realm, spaces that are ‘open to everybody, which offer something for everybody, and which provide a framework for urbanisation’.

As a Dubliner, I know that Dublin is one of the best cities in the world in which to live. Earlier this year Dublin was ranked the best city in Europe for Americans to live in, and the second best city in the world. Our record tourism figures show that millions of visitors agree.

Many of these visitors to Dublin will spend time here in Ballsbridge, possibly in one of the numerous hotels. It’s one of the oldest and grandest parts of Dublin, home to the RDS, and famous for its rows of Georgian terraces. Yet Ballsbridge, like Dublin, has undergone some profound changes in recent years. Not least of which, that shining beacon of Irish sport, the Aviva Stadium, is just a few streets away. So this hotel is an appropriate place to think about what the future should hold for our capital.

How can we make sure that Dublin remains a great place to live and to visit? The city already faces two existential challenges arising from the disastrous cycles of boom and bust: housing and transport.

I won’t dwell on the housing issue today, as my colleague Simon Coveney is doing sterling work with our Rebuilding Ireland plan, and I know he’s already spoken at you at your annual dinner. It will take time, but good progress is being made and he has the full support of the Government. I’ll come back to the issue of transport shortly.

We need to start thinking radically about Dublin’s future. The prospects are good, but only if we plan ahead.

Dublin’s population is set to reach two million by 2030, and it will truly be a world city with a large economy. This is a huge opportunity for the city and its residents.

There are six areas I think we should prioritise to ensure that Dublin enjoys strong and sustainable growth, and that it remains an attractive and vibrant city.

First of all, we need to continue to promote Dublin as a hub for foreign direct investment and headquarters operations.

We should not see the battle for investment or development as a competition between Dublin and the rest of Ireland. More often than not, Dublin is in competition with cities like Amsterdam, Manchester, Tel Aviv and San Francisco. And more often than not, what's lost to Dublin is lost to Ireland.

For Dublin to remain attractive to international investors, over-development needs to be avoided. An unliveable city of traffic gridlock, scarce expensive housing and limited education options will choke itself.

Balanced regional development – when done well - plays to the strengths of a region and seeks to enhance these strengths by building links between them, and seeks to develop new opportunities out of the existing expertise and talent.

And a vibrant Dublin can attract international investment and revenue on an enormous scale. The revenues they will generate will help the economy as a whole. I know for some outside Dublin that the need for further investment in the capital is not always well received, but for the good of the country as a whole, as well as for the people living and working in Dublin, this is a message which needs to be articulated, and I believe it needs to be delivered upon.

Many of you will know that I am a passionate advocate for a single Mayor and stronger local government for Dublin.

The city needs a strong executive to oversee issues like transport and planning, and to fight its corner at national and international level. The matter was debated in the Dáil last month and there is cross-party support in favour of examining it again and submitting a worked-up proposal to the people of Dublin to vote on.

My personal preference is for something like the Paris or London model with an elected mayor and executive with full time assembly members dealing with major issues like planning and transport on a city-region level, and a number of local neighbourhood or borough councils dealing with very local issues, with part-time councillors strongly connected to their neighbourhoods like Malahide, Swords, Lucan, Dun Laoghaire, Clontarf the Docklands and so on.

It’s going to be an interesting debate and I encourage the Chamber to adopt a strong a position on it as you did in the past. The next local and European elections are scheduled for 2019.

I have heard some British commentators speculating that the UK could emulate Singapore by cutting new trade deals with the EU and the rest of the world.

I think that’s unrealistic, especially if the British Government decides to close its borders to talent and trade.

Instead, I think Dublin has a much better chance of becoming like Singapore, and acting as the euro-using English-speaking gateway to the EU, precisely because we are committed to the European Union and because we embrace globalisation at a time when others fear it. Dublin’s well-educated, English-speaking, hard-working population has already helped to attract numerous multinationals to the city. By remaining inside the EU, trading with the other 26 members, and trading through the EU with the rest of the world, we can seize the opportunity provided by recent events.

We also need tax policies that attract and retain talent. If the last few decades were about attracting companies to Ireland with a favourable tax regime, the next few decades will be about human capital, attracting developing and retaining talent. At the moment, we tax talent too much.

International connections and tourism are also key to this. Dublin Airport is already a significant asset, with new routes opening annually.

As Transport Minister, I had a role in restoring direct air connections to San Francisco and the inception of our first direct services to Africa through Addis. There is much more to come with Qatar announced, Miami, the gateway to Latin America, due to start in September and an MOU with China now signed. There is huge potential to build on this further with Brexit fast approaching and the possibility of Ryanair feeding Dublin as a secondary hub. We should fully support a new runway for our airport and get on with building it.

Alongside the airport, we should recall our maritime heritage. Cruise ships represent an enormous opportunity for Dublin. This sector is already doing very well, but there is vast potential for future development.

There are long-standing plans to emulate what we have achieved in aviation in shipping by developing a maritime IFSC in Dublin. This deserves and will get full Government support, as will the expansion of the Port.

We urgently need more hotel beds and must look seriously at providing more exhibition space and conference facilities so that we can host big expos on the scale of Web Summit once again.

A city needs to live and breathe. That’s why my fourth priority is civic infrastructure. We are lucky that Dublin, like Madrid and some other European cities, has a permanent population in the city centre. It doesn’t, like some American cities, empty out at night and only come alive during the day. We should aim to increase considerably the population living between the canals and the near suburbs. To do so, we need to build much higher outside the Georgian core.

We need to look after this population, as well as those working in or visiting the city. One way to do that is to provide more civic spaces. I commend the city council for its plan to pedestrianise College Green. This is one of the most beautiful urban landscapes in the city, but is choked with traffic throughout the day. We need more such plans.

City centre space is limited, but we make little or no use of our rooftops. Imagine if rooftops across the centre were turned into gardens, or cafés, or performance spaces. There are endless possibilities.

I mentioned our built Georgian heritage earlier, but the recovering economy gives us an opportunity to be more adventurous. I’m not talking about the 1950s and 1960s eyesores that still blight some parts of the city.

I got to be well acquainted with one of those when I was Minister for Health. Fortunately Hawkins House will soon be reduced to rubble. But I am disappointed with its proposed replacement which is little more than a collection of squat office blocks.

Instead, we should borrow from London or Barcelona where they have encouraged some really original, and now world-famous, new buildings. Meanwhile, our universities play a key role in Irish cultural life, so it makes sense to encourage more purpose-built student accommodation in the city. We also need to provide a workable solution for the long-term sustainable funding of our universities. Dublin needs at least one university in the World’s top 50 if not two in the top 100. Underfunding third level is a false economy not just for the Government but also for students and alumni and the value of their degrees they hold.

Significant Government investment is being made in our National Cultural Institutions like the National Gallery but do we not also need a National Theatre worthy of our great writers and actors?

And finally, my final priority has to be transport. Probably the most pressing issue for Dublin is to identify how to help people to travel into and out of work. In recent weeks we have seen the return of headlines about the M50 reaching peak capacity, and ever-longer commutes.

I think it’s time to kick-start serious investment in sustainable transport. Building more and more roads is not the solution. Japan and America tried it, with motorways cutting right through their cities. And it hasn’t worked.

We need to look at countries like the Netherlands or Denmark, where they have invested heavily in sustainable transport.

We are linking the LUAS lines. I made the decision to do so, but we need more of them to places like Lucan and Ringsend. Luas lines are expensive to build but once built, require little or no subvention. Metro North is back in the plans but a decision has yet to be made on start dates for DART Underground and the extensions linked to it.

We need more bus services, which will have to involve a greater role for the private sector. We also need more dedicated cycle lanes – including off-road routes - such as the long-awaited Sutton to Sandycove project.

Significant public transport infrastructure does not come cheap and invariably involves detailed consideration of various options, but as I know from my time in Transport, much of that work has already been done. You could fill this room with the various reports and cost benefit analyses that have been completed.

What is required is the political will now to prioritise some of these projects. I do not underestimate the difficulty involved, with competing worthwhile projects from health and education, to name but two other Departments, and indeed competing transport projects in the rest of Ireland.

Currently, we operate from capital investment plans that are funded on a five year basis. Urban planning requires a 25 year funded plan. I have already spoken in Brussels about the need to challenge the tight fiscal rules that constrain capital budgets. While they might be appropriate in older European countries with developed infrastructure and falling or ageing populations, they do not work for a young country with a growing population and massive infrastructural deficits that risk becoming barriers to further growth in themselves.

Over the centuries Dublin has grown and evolved, and the periods when it has thrived the most are the times when it has embraced change, rather than run from it.

The same principle applies to Ireland as a whole. Our country and our economy have benefited when we have embraced the world – sometimes out of necessity, but also because the Irish are in many ways a global people.

However, in this twenty-first century the Irish Government faces a tough new set of issues: maintaining the public finances in a prudent manner, having only recently emerged from the Great Recession, while negotiating industrial relations challenges against an uncertain global economy, while straddling the growing divide between the US and Europe, and fighting for Ireland’s needs during the Brexit negotiations.

Earlier I mentioned Alexander Garvin, who championed the importance of open spaces to the public realm of our cities. I think the concept of open spaces is a good way to describe this meeting here today, and a good policy to adopt for the future.

This Government needs to ensure that there is an open space where its Ministers and officials can meet with and engage with bodies like yours, so that we pool our knowledge, share our experience, and above all, chart a way through the period ahead.

One hundred years ago James Joyce said that when he died Dublin would be written across his heart. But he also recognised that a paralysis was holding the city back. Since that time Dublin has been regenerated as a city of opportunity, industry and imagination. We can never allow paralysis to take hold again.

We all share that determination, and if we work together we can face the years ahead with confidence.

ENDS