All to play for as Croke Park agreement receives boost

THE GAA may have welcomed rugby and soccer to its hallowed headquarters, but the Croke Park deal more closely resembles a boxing match with the opponents repeatedly falling and picking themselves up.

The knock-out punch seemed to have been delivered more than a month ago. At that point the executive of the largest solely public service union IMPACT jabbed below the belt of its own outgoing general secretary, Peter McLoone, and said it could not endorse the deal to which he had been chief union contributor.

A lack of certainty that the December budget pay cuts would be restored and a distrust of guarantees of no more pay cuts until 2014 were blamed.

However, even as that position was being articulated, observers were not taking the bait. What one senior figure described as a “silent majority” was already forming within the union ranks. Those members were not prepared to so lightly dismiss the possibility of no pay cuts for four years at a time of such economic uncertainty.

ICTU leaders rapidly made contact with mediator, Kieran Mulvey, of the Labour Relations Commission to seek clarifications which might assuage the concerns of doubters.

The fruits of that labour emerged this week. It was enough to convince the IMPACT executive to reverse its position and endorse the deal. That decision was also helped by the lifting of the threat of suspensions against its members working in the HSE who had been refusing to collate and report key financial data.

The Croke Park deal is not just about IMPACT. It represents only a sixth of 300,000 public servants.

However, for some weeks it has been obvious that it will be IMPACT whose members held the key to whether the terms hammered out at Croke Park will stand or fall.

Within the next six weeks, whenever all of the unions have completed their individual ballots, the public service committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions will meet to vote on what the ICTU position will be on the deal. Each union will be assigned a number of votes according to their membership. The number of votes is 2,885. Before the IMPACT executive’s epiphany, the unions pushing their members towards rejecting to just under 1,000 votes while those in favour held 1,200.

The IMPACT executive’s decision gives 600 more votes to the “yes” camp and almost certainly means the deal will be accepted as long as unions go with the recommendations of their executives. There is further grounds for optimism among the pro-deal campaigners. The ASTI, which holds 183 votes in the ICTU ballot, may have recommended a rejection of the deal to its members last month, but it is highly possible that specific clarifications given to the education sector may make teachers think twice.

Among other things these confirmed that a review of teachers’ contracts will focus on delivery of the full school year of 183 days at primary-level and 167 days at second-level. That may mean some teacher-training programmes and school planning meetings being moved outside school hours, but it eases the concerns among many teachers who feared an open-ended review that might leaded to reduced holidays or increased duties.

It is still far too early to say that the Croke Park deal will definitely be ratified.

Even if the majority in the ICTU ballot falls on the side of acceptance, there will be a large and significant minority who have already indicated they will not be bound by the terms of the deal. One of those is the Teachers Union of Ireland which yesterday insisted that in spite of the clarifications in the education terms of the deal it was still pushing for a no vote.

If large chunks of the civil service or education system are not cooperating with the transformation agenda, it is highly improbable that the savings the Government require from that agenda will be achieved and in that eventuality all sides may be forced back to the negotiating table in order to stave off the collapse of the deal.