Sustaining Progress - Department of Taoiseach

■ Competitive in a changing world;
■ Environmentally sustainable;
■ Efficient through finding and implementing appropriate market and regulatory regimes in different
areas; and
■ Socially acceptable.
The report notes that Ireland’s current situation can be understood by focusing on a number of the
economic and social vulnerabilities that have arrived together:
■ “A loss of competitiveness through increasing wage and non-wage costs in the context of
slower growth
■ High-tech downturn in the US
■ Exchange rate developments now exacerbating Ireland’s loss of cost-competitiveness
■ Unresolved internal issues, particularly concerning land, housing and settlement
■ A sharp deterioration of the public finances, reflecting in particular the economic slow-down
and pro-cyclical policies
■ Insufficient delivery in many public services
■ Slow progress on other changes: Science/Technology, Lifelong Learning
■ Expensive and slow progress on some key infrastructural developments
■ Growing pressure on the environment from several sources
■ Increased development land and house prices, that are influencing wage bargaining, increasing
inequality, raising business costs and increasing the cost of public infrastructure
■ Pressure on the health services, which most adversely affect those reliant on the public system
■ Pressure on the family through long commuting times and shortages of childcare
■ Increased immigration, which has benefited the economy significantly, can give rise to certain
problems and pressures
■ Social resources and capabilities, including those within the family, are now stretched in some
areas (including urban concentrations of disadvantage and rural areas experiencing population
loss, with consequential problems of rural isolation and pressure on services)
■ Environmental problems, as evidenced in difficulties in waste management
■ Rapid development may lower the aesthetic quality of the built environment
■ Centralised and rigid systems of social policy and social services have proved unable to meet
the needs of citizens and this is felt most acutely by those reliant on the public system
■ Public policies to combat exclusion and inequality have progressed significantly – through the
formulation of strategies and allocation of resources-but now confront real challenges of
implementation
■ Ireland has experienced a relatively large increase in earnings dispersion in a context in which
the dispersion of earnings was already high by international standards
Chapter 1 Introduction
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