‘I’M MONITORING GARDAI’ – FULL INTERVIEW:
In an exclusive interview with Irish Daily Mail Political Editor Senan Molony, an Taoiseach talks frankly about the troubles within our police force, rising insurance costs – and why wine drinkers can look forward to this year’s Budget...
Q. On the justice front, is the real issue not your continuing full confidence in the Garda Commissioner, but the haemorrhaging of public trust in her as evidenced by the million false breath tests, the wrongful convictions, the whistleblower allegations and in the wake of the PAC report? I take it, by the way, you’ve read it now?
‘Yes, I’ve read the findings. There are matters of very significant public concern that come out of that report. I’m not satisfied at all at the way finances and public money was managed by the gardaí at Templemore.
Ultimately taxpayers’ money must be used for the purpose to which it is allocated, and that applies to any public body, and State agency and any Government department.
I expect the gardaí, from the top down, will respond to that and change the way they manage public money. I am a big supporter of the gardaí. We are a very safe country; we have one of the lowest crime rates in Europe, and a lot of that is down to the fact that we have a very competent, trusted Garda force.
And that’s not just words: I’m serious about it. We’re increasing Garda numbers again, we’re up to 13,500 this year, and we will go up to 15,000. We’re bringing in more reserves, more civilians, new buildings – just down the road in Kevin Street, for example, additional IT and additional Garda equipment, and we’ve agreed a pay deal with the gardaí that will bring average salaries close to €70,000 a year.
And I think in return for all that we’ve the right to expect the highest standards from the gardaí, from the Commissioner to the trainees, and that means managing public money as it is supposed to be managed, and it means the highest standard of policing and of prosecutions.’
Q. And you can guarantee the public that when the root-andbranch review is completed, it will have led to root-and-branch reform?
‘It will, and we’re not going to have to wait until the Commissioner reports. The way the Commission on the Future of Policing is going to work is that they are going to make interim reports every couple of months.
Sometimes a commission is set up and it allows nothing to happen for 15 months or two years, until it does report. The way this has been structured is that Kathleen O’Toole, who is chairing the commission, is going to be reporting on an interim basis, allowing us to introduce reforms as we go along.
And there are reforms under way already, of course. The Policing Authority is set up, they are providing additional oversight, and are already putting a lot of lot of pressure on Garda management.
Gsoc (the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission) has been given more powers, and as I mentioned earlier, we’re resourcing up the gardaí both in terms of staff and equipment. As Taoiseach, I am going to be monitoring all of that very closely.’
Q. The gender pay gap is becoming an issue in RTÉ since the BBC published all its salaries
‘I welcome the fact that RTÉ is going to carry out this review into pay in the organisation. The Tánaiste [Frances Fitzgerald], who is now the Minister for Enterprise, Business and Innovation, has taken on, as part of her task, a decision to take a look a gender pay gaps, not just in RTÉ, but across the corporate sector.
One of the things we would like to do, for example, is require larger employers to submit a survey of pay levels with their organisations. This is something that we want to act on. I am a strong believer that there should be equal pay for equal work in cases of equal experience.
I don’t think it can be just as simple as equal pay based on one criterion. I think you do need to look at individuals, and each individual is different.
The factors at play might be more than gender, for example. It’s a fact that the norm in the public sector is that people do get paid more based on their tenure, based on experience. People who work longer hours get paid more.
It is quite normal in the private sector that people can have their pay linked to the revenue they bring in. So I don’t think it’s just a simple matter of gender, but I do believe there is, at least on the face of it, evidence that where there’s a man and a woman with the same talent, the same experience, the same hours worked, bringing in the same revenue, that maybe they aren’t always paid equally. That is discrimination, in my view.
It is something the Tánaiste is going to be working on over the summer and autumn. As you can imagine, the response from some in the business community has been somewhat unenthusiastic. But I think the key thing isn’t going to be actually prosecuting employers, it’s instead going to be transparency. And this applies again not just to RTÉ, but across the semi-State sector and to private industry. Because understandably, where there are pay gaps that are solely down to gender, where there are not other factors, those employers may end up being embarrassed.’
Q. It can sometimes come down to equality of opportunity, too. Did Mary Mitchell O’Connor make those arguments to you when she was arguing to stay in Cabinet?
‘I am always sensitive to the need to have diversity in decision-making, because I actually believe it’s the right thing. You get better decisions and you get better buyin (from the public) if you have diversity around the table.
Diversity isn’t just about gender; there are other factors as well, and I sometimes think people see diversity only through the prism of their own case, gender, or race or socio-economic background. I don’t think that’s the right way to approach diversity. I think you have to look at all the different elements that give rise to diversity, but as I’ve said before, and I’ve found it difficult to get purchase for this argument, but there are 12 female TDs who support the Government, and seven of those 12 are ministers, including the Tánaiste and five members of Cabinet, and three are chairs of Oireachtas committees.
So if you look at the 12 female TDs who support the Government, ten of them are in paid promotional positions, which is 80-something per cent. In terms of promoting women, that’s a pretty good number.
The real problem in politics is that we don’t have enough women elected to the Dáil in the first place. And that’s something that my party is very keen on changing. We already have more female TDs in Fine Gael than in any other party, and it was my party in government that introduced gender quotas in candidates – not to force people to vote for women, but to give them the opportunity.
The increase in the general election quota is already in legislation and will increase to 40% (from 30%), not in the next election but in the one after that. And what I’m discussing with the party at the moment is introducing a gender quota on a voluntary basis for the local elections. It is probably coming up first, although of course we can’t know how long this Dáil and Government is going to last.
But what’s definitely coming up in 2019 are elections to local authorities, and Irish politics being local and community-based by nature, the majority of TDs come from local authorities. So if we are going to change things, we need to do so there as well.
What Fine Gael is going to do on a voluntary basis is to bring on our own candidate quota to make sure we have a critical mass of women contesting local elections on our behalf, and then hopefully many of those can come through and become TDs in the future.’
Q. Fine Gael has slapped €1 on the bottle of wine since being
returned to government in recent times. We now have the highest rate of duty in the EU. I know you are wedded to minimum unit pricing, but might there be some relief in the Budget in this area?
‘I have to say that during a number of very difficult years of financial crisis, when there were a lot of cutbacks and new charges and tax increases, I’m amazed at how often I’m reminded that we put a euro on a bottle of wine. It still comes up an awful lot – both that and the abolition of the telephone allowance for the elderly on the cuts side, which also comes up a lot.
Maybe it is the people I spend time with, but they have a particular grievance about the €1 on the bottle of wine and they are very keen to remind me about it. So, while I can’t give away any Budget secrets – not that I’m hiding them, but these decisions haven’t been made yet – I wouldn’t anticipate a further increase in excise on wine in the Budget.
Where we are going is somewhere different in the Public Health (Alcohol) Bill, which will be enacted before the end of the year. That will do a number of things: it is trying to make alcohol less visible, because it is almost treated now like an ordinary grocery product, when we all know it isn’t – it’s a mind-bending drug that makes us all do things we shouldn’t do and say things we wouldn’t otherwise say, and we all need to drink a lot less of it, or at least those of us who do drink – and also there is going to have some be restrictions on advertising and sponsorship.
Crucially, it will also introduce minimum unit pricing and what that is designed to do is not to increase the price of wine and spirits and beer across the board, but to get rid of the very cheap beers and spirits which facilitate people drinking to excess.
It is not about making the bottle of wine that you drink with your pizza more expensive, or the glass of wine that you have in the pub. But it is about getting rid of people buying huge amounts of alcohol at very low prices and getting extremely drunk.
Minimum unit pricing shouldn’t affect the price of alcohol in the restaurant, in the café, the pub or the hotel. But it will eliminate very cheap alcohol from supermarkets and off-licences.’
Q. Is there an insurance cartel in operation in Ireland? We’ve had those recent raids by senior EU officials on major firms… and when you talk about strengthening the penalties against white-collar crime, what sort of examples do you have in mind?
‘I don’t know if there is a cartel, and I don’t have any evidence of a cartel, but I do know that there are investigations, both by the European authorities and our own Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, into this area. Competition legislation is one of the areas of corporate probity where the legislation is already very strong. Of course you need evidence when it comes to a decision to prosecute.
What there definitely is in insurance in Ireland is a lack of competition. We talk about having a single European market, yet it is virtually impossible to buy insurance from another jurisdiction.
There are lots of things you can buy from Germany or France or Britain, but insurance isn’t one of them. So I think there definitely is a lack of competition.
Encouragingly, though, some of the work carried out by the Insurance Task Force that was set up and chaired by Eoghan Murphy is starting to show results. Premiums for car insurance in 2017, for example, are falling. Now they are still way higher than they were a few years ago, so we have a long way to go, but I am encouraged by the fact that the increases are moderating, and there is even some evidence now that premiums are falling.
But there is no good reason why people in Ireland should be paying substantially more for their car or home or business insurance than people in other parts of Europe.’
Q. We heard of a worrying survey this morning of the propensity of Irish drivers to text while at the wheel, more than in other countries, but is the single market in insurance something you will be bringing up at European Council level?
‘Very much so. We call it the single market in services.
At the first European Council I attended, a few weeks ago, we proposed an amendment to particularly emphasise that Ireland really wants there to be a single market in services, first of all because we think Irish consumers will get better value, and it is not just in insurance but in all forms of services, and secondly because we think Irish firms, on balance, could do quite well.
Irish firms that are nimble and competitive could sell their services into European markets. Some of the bigger countries are resistant to it, but it is something we are definitely going to pursue.’