EU: EU employment and social ministers agreed yesterday on the need to increase greatly the availability of childcare as one of a number of steps to expand female participation in the labour force, writes Chris Dooley in Galway
Measures to curtail the numbers dependent on welfare and to reduce incentives towards early retirement were also on the agenda at the informal council meeting in Galway.
Thirty-nine ministers from the 15 EU states and 10 accession countries attended the day-long meeting, chaired by the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Ms Coughlan, and the Minister of State for Labour Affairs, Mr Fahey. The EU Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, Ms Anna Diamantopoulou, congratulated the Irish ministers for their "excellent handling" of the event.
Council meetings with more than 30 ministers were a new experience and were not easy to run, she said.
Despite what the Commissioner said was a "lively discussion", ministers agreed on several priority areas for action.
Mr Fahey, who chaired discussions on two topics - prolonging working life and reconciling work and family life - said the main conclusion was that there was a need to increase the availability, affordability and quality of childcare and care for the elderly.
This was necessary if the EU was to make a significant impact on the ability of women, in particular, to enter the workplace.
"It was also stressed that greater emphasis must be placed on parental leave and, indeed, on a change in culture in the workplace, so that men can take on the family role and allow more women to access the workplace."
The main theme of the meeting was "making work pay", with the focus partly on how to strike a balance between maintaining high levels of social security without providing disincentives for people to seek work.
Ms Coughlan sought to allay fears, expressed by unions and other social partnership groups, that the EU might move towards a more punitive system which pushed people into poor-quality, low-paid jobs. Ministers and the Commissioner had agreed, she said, that social protection systems should strengthen incentives and supports aimed at moving people off benefits and into work, but that this should not call into question their primary role in providing adequate benefits to people who needed them.
Ms Diamantopoulou said no "concrete decisions" had been taken, as it was an informal council meeting, but a basis had been created for very important decisions in the future.
Groups campaigning against poverty and social exclusion, however, said it was time for EU governments to start living up to their promises. Mr Fintan Farrell of the European Anti-Poverty Network said there was a "huge gap" between what ministers said and what they did, and this was one of the reasons people felt alienated from the EU.
Ms Coughlan, he said, had stressed that this week's discussions about making work pay had to take place in the context of maintaining and developing high levels of social protection.
This suggested ministers were meeting with the objective of maintaining a European social model in which people had access to a dignified life.
However, there had been an "absolute contradiction" between that sort of aspiration and what had actually been happening in terms of social assistance cuts in a number of member-states, including Ireland, he said.