Bank deals ‘make pay pact a hard sell’

THE broker of the Croke Park Agreement said multi-million euro awards to bankers are making it harder to get the public service deal adopted.

Labour Relations Commission chief executive Kieran Mulvey will, over the next few days, receive requests for clarifications on some issues agreed at Croke Park.

However, even without those assurances, he said trade unions would find it hard to sell the deal given the “venality” of the banks in recent months.

“How can you have a situation where, over the last 12-18 months, the most extraordinary venality has been exposed in terms of the banks and it is still continuing,” he told RTÉ. “I wonder – we have put public service directors on these bodies – what are they doing? Are they not raising questions and if they are what answers have they received?”

“What I am complaining about is the series of malfeasance that has emanated over the last week to ten days in the context of where the Government and unions are trying to tackle a really serious situation in public finances. It does not seem to have penetrated the minds of people at senior levels within our financial institutions, who have been bailed out massively by the taxpayers of this country and put us all in debt for generations to come, that this has to stop.”

Mr Mulvey said for the last 30 years, banks and financial institutions had been embroiled in scandal but no one had paid except the taxpayer.

He said it was in that vein that public service leaders were trying to sell the Croke Park deal to their members.

Trade union leaders on the executive of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) considered the agreement and decided they will help the public service committee of ICTU to frame the clarifications that need to be sought from the Government.

“One of the points that is at issue is that the whole re-organisation/reconfiguration (of the public service) is being interpreted as providing a license for the authorities to kick people from pillar to post,” said SIPTU president Jack O’Connor. “That was not agreed to by our negotiators and it was not envisaged by negotiators on the other side because it would bring about the collapse of the agreement.”