Warning of a substantial gender gap in employment in Ireland, the Irish Commissioner for Social Affairs, Mr Padraig Flynn, called yesterday for a sustained effort by the Government to increase childcare provision.
"Women should have the choice between working and staying at home," Mr Flynn said, "and if they want to work outside the home they should be facilitated to do so." Mr Flynn was presenting to journalists a series of recommendations from the Commission on each of the member-states' employment strategies. It singles out Ireland's lack of childcare provisions and tax disincentives as important barriers to women's involvement in the workforce. The report sees the deficiencies as likely to contribute to emerging labour shortages.
But in ranking the performance of member-states in line with reform guidelines set out last year, Mr Flynn said Ireland joined the UK, Sweden and Denmark in meeting agreed targets. The report is the product of the employment chapter in the Amsterdam Treaty and is the first in which the Commission makes recommendations to member-states and comments on their performance. The name-and-shame strategy is supposed to encourage peer pressure to reform labour markets and is likely to prove particularly controversial in countries such as Italy, Greece and Belgium, which are singled out for special criticism.
A clearly delighted Mr Flynn, for whom the occasion was a farewell to the press, said later that the first of the annual reports, and the employment guidelines that accompany them, represented the successful outcome of a long process started at Essen in 1994 to give the EU a role in employment. "My work here is done," he said.
Mr Flynn said he would be returning to Ireland, where he hoped to write at least one book. Although he had no intention of standing for public office, he would be maintaining a strong interest in public affairs as well as in business.
Mr Flynn said the employment rate had increased in the EU last year to 61 per cent, with 1.8 million new jobs created. Unemployment has fallen to 9.3 per cent in July from 10 per cent last year.
But the rate of improvement was not fast enough and the EU still lagged at least 9 percentage points behind both the US and Japan. There were still 600,000 fewer at work than in 1991.
And he singled out as specific problems the low employment rate for 50-64-year-olds (47.6 per cent), the over-20 per cent gender gap between male and female employment rates, and the still huge potential for job creation in the services sector.
The report on Ireland warns that "bottlenecks in labour supply are likely to emerge, which will act as a constraint on future economic growth". There is also a "substantial gender gap in employment, which offers scope for an increase in the participation of women in the labour market".
