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Statement from Dr Maureen Gaffney on the dissolution of the NESF

April 2010

 

I would like to thank every member of the NESF, past and present, who contributed so wholeheartedly to the work, functioning and ethos of the NESF. My particular thanks go to the members who served on the Management Committee and on the Project Teams which prepared the reports.

I also want to put on record the many achievements of the NESF which was set up in June 1993. In its sixteen and a half years the NESF has produced 39 Reports, 10 NESF Opinions, 5 Social Inclusion Forum Conference Reports, and 7 Research and Seminar Series Reports. The implementation of recommendations from those reports has made a significant and lasting effect on the Irish policy landscape. The NESF was the largest of the social partnership bodies, with over 60 members. It was the first social partnership body that included not just the traditional social partners, but representatives from the voluntary and community sector, and it benefited hugely from their passion and commitment. It was the only social partnership body with representatives from the Oireachtas, whose wide-ranging experience of policy-making and emerging issues also greatly enriched the work of the Forum. The experience of the traditional social partners – trade unions, IBEC, the farming organisations, senior government and local authority officials - provided a much needed ballast, particularly in the early days of the NESF as we found our feet. Their advice and support was always readily available to me as Chair. The help and support of the then Minister of State at the Department of Tánaiste, Eithne Fitzgerald, and of her senior officials was particularly crucial. In subsequent years, the support of the Taoiseach and his senior officials was equally forthcoming.

The strong focus of the NESF has been on issues of equality and social inclusion. It has taken a particular interest in key areas such as early childcare and education and educational disadvantage, starting with the publication of the Report on Early School Leavers and Youth Employment in 1997, the Report on Early School Leavers in 2002, the Report on Early Childhood Care and Education in 2005, and the Report on Child Literacy and Social Inclusion in 2009. It has argued strongly in its reports for the provision of high quality early education, literacy and other educational initiatives, particularly for children from disadvantaged communities. It has continued to stress the severe economic and social costs of educational disadvantage, evident in early school leaving, truancy, low self-esteem, poor job prospects – not just for the children themselves, but also for their future children. The NESF has also made a significant contribution to other areas of disadvantage and social exclusion - for better provision for the unemployed, for lone parents, for older people; for equality for gay, lesbian and bi-sexual people; for the integration of ex-prisoners in to the community, and for those suffering from mental ill health. Some of our achievements in those areas are listed overleaf.

The NESF also developed a strongly independent, consultative and participative ethos. It was open in a routine way to other actors in the system and to those working directly with people experiencing poverty and social exclusion. This way of working facilitated the early identification of emerging trends in social exclusion, and of the glitches and failures in policies designed to address them. In the last few years, the NESF facilitated the inclusion of people with specialist interest and experience (for example in the area of mental health) into the social partnership process, adding immeasurably to the richness of the work. It was the professional experience, strong commitment to work collaboratively across the four pillars of social partnership, and most particularly the passion of NESF members for making a difference in the lives of those experiencing social exclusion and poverty that made all of the above possible.

I want to thank the NESF secretariat and administrative staff, past and present, and the many eminent people, leaders in their field, who chaired the NESF Project teams. It was their combined professionalism, their ability to work flexibly with so many different groups and their ability to craft workable policy solutions and compromises that brought the work of the NESF to fruition.