Public servants could work longer ‘to avoid cuts’

ONE of the key brokers of the Croke Park deal on public service pay and reform has conceded that public servants could work longer in order to stave off potential pay cuts.

Labour Relations Commission chief executive Kieran Mulvey said a review of the range of public services offered could ensure they are carried out to their full potential. He said it may be found that some services should not be offered at all.

Over the weekend, low paid civil servants, members of the Civil Public and Services Union voted at their annual general conference to withhold co-operation with reforms under the Croke Park Agreement and to strike if their pay was cut again by the Government.

The move follows the intense scrutiny the pay agreement has come under in the past week. While the deal always stated that a promise of no further pay cuts was predicated on identifiable and sufficient saving across the public service, various members of the Government hammered that point home in recent days.

Nonetheless, Public Sector Reform Minister Brendan Howlin, who is tasked with driving the efficiencies across the state services, is upbeat that the savings can be made without pay cuts in spite of the CPSU move.

He said on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics: “It is understandable that there is resistance but we have to get, as a country, to the aim of a balanced budget.

“The Croke Park deal is the vehicle by which we can achieve this objective. If people don’t want to buy into that, well then, they won’t be protected by the protection measures that are implicit in the Croke Park agreement.

“I am optimistic that there will be such buy-in in the process of getting our fiscal targets achieved, the numbers reduced that we will not have to resort, I hope, to further wage cuts because I know how painful that is and I know how marginal some people’s incomes are.”

On the same programme, Kieran Mulvey, a chief mediator between the Government, employers and trade unions during last year’s negotiations in Croke Park, said he still believed the deal could deliver the savings required but thought the process would be further advanced by now.

He forecast that an imminent review of the deal will bring “sharper focus”.

“There is a burning platform, it’s called €52bn of expenditure with €32bn of income and we have to face very severe facts around this,” he said.

“Nobody wants any more pay cuts but we can change the way we work. We potentially, probably could work longer. We could look at the programmes we give. Can we do them more effectively and efficiently in the public service? Are there programmes we are actually doing at the moment that shouldn’t be done at all?”