‘Pay cuts, tax hikes if Croke Park deal lost’

THE leader of the trade union representing senior public service managers and civil servants has warned high taxes and pay cuts will follow a rejection of the Croke Park Agreement on pay and public service reform.

Speaking ahead of his union’s biennial conference in Dublin on Friday, Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants general secretary Dave Thomas predicted his union’s 3,000 members would ratify the deal when their ballot is completed later this week.

“The feedback I have got is that the promise of no pay cuts before 2014 is as good as we can get and along with the mechanism for the reversal of the pay cuts, are a good proposal on the table considering the finances of the state,” he said. “We don’t see any alternative.

“We all know what the Government finances are producing and they have to make savings. If they are not making savings one way they will have to do it in another and it will either be high taxes or pay cuts or a combination.”

Mr Thomas confirmed the reversal of pay cuts for assistant secretaries and above in the public service earlier this year had caused difficulties for the union in selling the deal.

“A lot of the people who would have been opposed to taking industrial action and who were in favour of the proposal were quite incensed especially given the way it was done,” he said. Meanwhile, the public service committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has confirmed the number of votes each public service union will have when the committee finally meets to decide whether ICTU as the umbrella union organisation will accept or reject the Croke Park deal. The unions will cast their votes in that overall ballot according to the outcome of their individual ballots, which are all still ongoing.

The executives of all of the major unions apart from IMPACT have made a recommendation to their members on whether to accept or reject. If those recommendations are reflected in the outcome of the individual ballots, IMPACT’s vote will prove crucial in the ensuing ICTU ballot.

However, it must be pointed out that even if the ICTU public service committee votes to accept the deal, a number of unions have already said they will not be bound by that.