Unions committed to Croke Park deal

I DIDN’T agree with the conclusions in your two-page feature on the Croke Park agreement (April 13). But the Irish Examiner is to be congratulated on a rare attempt to put the debate into some context for readers, and to report on the agreement’s achievements as well as its shortcomings.

The most important objective of the Croke Park deal is to save taxpayers’ money while ensuring that services are protected — and in some cases expanded — as spending and staff numbers fall.

Although it’s by far the biggest savings-generator in the Croke Park agreement, your feature’s “progress to date” round-up barely mentioned staff reductions or the reorganisation and staff redeployment that is ensuring that falling employment has a minimum impact on public services.

Although it seldom gets newspaper headlines, the fact that public service numbers have fallen by 16,000 in the last two years is now generating ongoing savings of €900 million each year. This figure will grow substantially as public service numbers continue to fall. The agreement says that this year HSE staff numbers will fall to 2006 levels and civil service numbers will fall to 2002 levels.

Meanwhile, local authority staffing is down to levels last seen a decade ago, and numbers will continue to fall across the public service in 2012, 2013, and 2014.

These productivity achievements are what most interests the IMF. That’s why IMPACT believes that, contrary to your conclusion, this element of the Government’s “recovery plan” will meet IMF and EU savings targets and expectations.

On top of this, the so-called pension levy and pay cuts add annual savings of €1.8 billion, while reforms in specific parts of the public service are delivering more, albeit on a smaller scale.

Conor Ryan’s article rightly points out that some (though not all) of the reforms are happening too slowly. The unions are committed to the rapid implementation of all the reforms agreed in Croke Park and backed by public servants in ballots.

But many of the yet-to-be-implemented reforms that make the headlines are not going to deliver the kind of large-scale savings that come with staff reductions and associated redeployment and service reorganisation.

Bernard Harbor

National Secretary

IMPACT Trade Union

Dublin 1