Croke Park deal - What price picket line peace?

Despite official government insistence to the contrary, the drum beats are getting louder for an attack on the Croke Park Agreement.

The latest opinion-gathering exercise points to a mood among the Coalition’s grassroots to renegotiate the deal’s core promise not to cut public sector pay.

That the survey was carried out by a Fine Gael senator is revealing, although Catherine Noone has undoubtedly been hearing the rumblings from her constituents in the Seanad’s industrial and commercial panel as much as the grumbling of her local authority colleagues.

However, the findings are only the most recent indicator that the assurances given by a former government at a time when public finances looked dreadful but not catastrophic cannot automatically be expected to be guaranteed by a new government when catastrophe is upon us.

Brian Hayes, the junior finance minister, stressed last week that public sector workers would have to meet their side of the deal and deliver real reform and efficiencies if their pay was to be spared the waiting axe.

More significantly given their party’s staunch allegiance to the public sector, Labour ministers Brendan Howlin, Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore all made similar remarks since the budget.

Naturally, they have also been quick to point out the benefits of the agreement, highlighting the reforms it has achieved and warning of the industrial relations havoc that would ensue if it was arbitrarily abandoned.

By emphasising the two-way street structure of the agreement, they have been laying the groundwork for a scenario in which failure by the workers to proceed swiftly enough in the direction set out for them would provide reason to put up a stop sign.

What’s strange is that this is their choice of strategy at all. Measuring reform is notoriously difficult and while the Government has put figures on the cost cutting achieved under the agreement to date, the wider public would be better convinced of its effectiveness if there was a straight percentage cut in the pay bill or a clear saving on the controversial increments payments.

The Croke Park Agreement should be as much about protecting public services as about protecting public servants and all it will take is for the unions to cry that already stretched services are about to snap under the strain of unreasonable reforms for panic to set in.

It should not be necessary to get to this point. The agreement is conditional on there being “no currently unforeseen budgetary deterioration”. Our poorer-than-expected exchequer returns alone could arguably satisfy the requirements for activating that get-out clause.

It is understandable why the Government is not keen to push that button. Industrial relations unrest would create a headache at home and an image problem abroad. However, there is a price to be paid for picket line peace and at some stage soon the Coalition will have to decide if it isn’t currently too high.