Shatter: Unions should be taken to court

COURT injunctions should be issued against unions involved in industrial action at the passport office, Fine Gael’s Alan Shatter has demanded.

The call came during a session of the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs yesterday, where officials from the department said the backlog in passport applications now stood at just under 50,000.

This is a rise from about 44,000 at the beginning of the week.

Mr Shatter said that as the provision of a passport was a constitutional right the Government should seek High Court injunctions against those slowing down their supply.

It was his belief that those failing to secure a passport in a timely fashion could sue the state for monies lost, with the Department of Foreign Affairs counter-suing the CPSU.

The committee had earlier heard the Department of Foreign Affairs secretary general David Cooney call for the union to end its industrial action which began on January 19.

He said the passport office staff were “decent, hardworking people” but the scale of the CPSU action made the accumulation of a massive backlog in applications inevitable. He said the CPSU offer on Tuesday to provide an emergency passport service for those with immediate travel plans was “too little, too late”.

Mr Cooney added that the severe damage to a passport production machine in a flood in the Molesworth Street office last Tuesday was not seriously adding to the growing backlog as documents were also being printed in Balbriggan.

Department officials are attempting to establish a waiting room for those queuing for passports in the Molesworth Street area.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil committee members supported the hard line being taken against the low paid civil servants, with Fine Gael’s Billy Timmins calling for the eventual outsourcing to the private sector of passport production.

Labour’s Micheal D Higgins said the industrial action could not be separated from the wider issue of the conflict between unions and the Government over public sector pay cuts.

Mr Cooney agreed stating: “We are dealing with the localised impact of a centralised dispute.”