Muted response to agreement

THERE was muted reaction from the Opposition benches to the breakthrough deal between public service unions and the Government.

However, Taoiseach Brian Cowen said a difficult situation could now be resolved if unions looked to the stabilising benefits of the deal.

He said the Government would not encroach any further into the basic pay of public sector workers if greater flexibility was agreed.

“What we need is a public service that we can afford but we need a public service that will provide for the needs the people. And I think we have far more in common to conduct our business than having an argument.

“What people are getting here from Government is a commitment not to look at the pay side of the equation for the immediate future. We look at all the non-pay issues that we can deal with so that we have an affordable, good public service that is fit for purpose,” he said.

Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore praised the Labour Relations Commission mediator, Kieran Mulvey, for bringing the Government and the unions together.

And he said the success of this week’s talks underscored the failure of the Government ahead of last December’s budget, when negotiations broke down in acrimony.

“It was a serious error on the part of the Government to terminate the talks with the public service unions last December and instead take the road of imposing unilateral pay cuts.

“With greater effort agreement could have been reached last December and the subsequent industrial action could have been avoided,” he said.

And he said the situation had not been helped by the “demonisation” of the public sector in discussion around the state’s finances.

Fine Gael’s Enterprise spokesman, Leo Varadkar, said the plan was broadly in line with his party’s demand that pay should be linked to transformation in the public sector – once it was not reliant on in-house policing.

“Any verification of public sector reforms must be conducted externally and cannot be allowed to become a rubber-stamping exercise, as happened with benchmarking,” he said.

However, Socialist Party MEP, Joe Higgins, said union leaders were brazen for asking low and middle income earners to accept the deal after already taking two rounds of pay cuts last year.

“This is a shameless sell out. It demonstrates utter contempt for rank and file trade union members. It portrays a trade union leadership in utter thrall to the discredited neo-liberal economic agenda and utterly incapable of offering any alternative to the resultant onslaught on workers’ jobs and living standards in both the public and private sectors,” he said.

Sinn Féin’s spokesman Martin Ferris said the deal should not be agreed because it did not speak to the recruitment embargo or the problems of the lower-paid.

“The deal is flawed in failing to reverse the pay cuts for even the lowest paid public service workers,” he said.