Delegate demands ICTU heads step down over ‘croppy boy’ leadership
Referring to the theme of the conference “A better, fairer way”, Sinead McKenna of the Civil Public & Services Union (CPSU) said a more fitting title would have been “an even more placid, quieter way”.
“I got excited when I saw an ICTU document entitled “A Call To Action”. But after reading it I realised it is, in short, a call to circle the wagons,” she said. “Really we should be coming out shooting at this stage. It is yet another report about what we should do.”
Calling on the ICTU leadership to step down she said their silence during the economic crisis had been deafening.
“Your inaction has been a stranglehold and gagging order on the Irish workers,” she told them.
She said the country had gotten rid of Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church. “But tell me, how do we get rid of a trade union leadership that have become so embedded in social partnership structures that they have apparently forgotten their original purpose.”
Referring to the language used by the leading figures at a number of trade union conferences she said: “I don’t want to hear about similarities between the Swedish and Japanese models. I want to hear anger and what I hear is an even more placid and quieter way.”
The leader of Ms McKenna’s union Blair Horan said that her position did not reflect that of the union as a whole.
However, in a later presentation Jimmy Kelly, the regional secretary of Unite trade union, made a similar call for a more targeted campaign moving forward.
“It is time that we move beyond a critique of the crisis and put forward a concrete alternative programme that is capable of mobilising our members, mobilising the public and forcing the Government to change course,” he said.
Mr Kelly said there had been talk of a return to social partnership in recent days but he said that partnership had weakened the trade union movement as it took away members’ individual independence to act as they needed to.
“Let us develop and then aggressively pursue concrete political and industrial strategies,” he said. “All actions, all initiatives should be on the table.”
However, ICTU general secretary said anger was not way the vast majority of Irish workers want to go.
“If we go that route we will lose the middle ground of Irish workers,” he said. “We can’t do a thing which takes Irish workers out into the open where they are cut to the pieces by the forces of capitalism. We are at a dangerous place. We have an enormous responsibility on our shoulders. If this generation of trade union leaders drops the ball, it is not that we will have a society that is some type of Trotskyist socialist utopia. What we could quite conceivably get is an authoritarian right wing politics which would be to the detriment of us all.”
