Croke Park deal faces ‘whole new ball game in 2011’

THE new year will see a “whole new ball game” for the Croke Park agreement due to the worsening economic crisis, Labour Relations Commission chief executive Kieran Mulvey told an Oireachtas Committee yesterday.

Appearing before the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Mr Mulvey, who was central to brokering the public sector reform deal agreed between unions and the public sector managers at Croke Park late in March said he had hoped that the agreement’s implementation would have taken place at a more “rapid” pace.

However, he stressed the benefits of the agreement saying if the governments of France, Portugal or Spain thought they could get a similar public service agreement they “would welcome it with open arms”.

He added that the LRC’s equivalent body in Britain, ACAS, had proposed a similar agreement to the British government after seeing how it operated in Ireland, though he said the agreement is now under the auspices of its implementation body and not directly a concern of the LRC.

Mr Mulvey warned that the next six months would be crucial for the deal.

He said by the time of a spring review of the agreement’s process there needed to be “tangible real results” evident from the public sector reform process.