Hints on public pay cuts - All for one, one for all

Two senior government figures — Public Expenditure and Reform Minister Brendan Howlin and junior minister Simon Harris — have suggested it may be possible, in the not-too-distant future, to consider reversing some pay and pension cuts, as well as new pension contributions imposed on public- sector workers in recent years.

They also opened a discussion about a return to collective bargaining, the process that served one set of workers far better than it did another.

Suggestions like this — nudge-nudge, we’ll-look-after-you reassurances — can be expected as the Government enters its autumn months. Nevertheless, it might not have been expecting too much to hope that our leaders had learnt the lessons of the past decade and that such divisive inequities had been finally consigned to history. Seemingly not.