New national agreement needed to stave off a winter of discontent

Ireland’s public servants are due a break. The question, I guess, is: ‘how is it to be engineered?’ asks Fergus Finlay

SO, are we looking at a winter of discontent? Or are we anticipating a government desperate to stay in office and willing to make any concession necessary to stave off division in its own ranks?

Either is possible. There is no doubt that throughout the public service (and beyond) there’s a lot of pent-up anger and frustration about pay cuts that people have endured for seven years now. It started before the Troika arrived, when Brian Lenihan told the Dáil that “we are now fighting for the economic future of our country”. He blamed the global financial crisis, which he described as the worst in 70 years, as having a profound effect on our banking and financial sector.

“As a small trading nation we are exceptionally vulnerable to the serious worldwide recession with a contraction in economic activity on a scale not seen for many decades,” said Mr Lenihan. “Three successive years of economic contraction are in prospect, something we have never had to face before in our history.” The legislation passed at the end of that debate in the Dáil imposed the first of several cuts on the pay and pensions of public servants throughout the country. They were opposed, of course, by the opposition at the time, who were at pains to point out that it was the policies of the government, as much as any international crisis, that had caused the problem. But in the end, the cuts went through.

And they were accepted, reluctantly but admirably, by thousands of teachers, nurses, gardaí, local authority workers, public transport workers, and many, many more. In part perhaps they were reassured by Brian Lenihan’s frequent reference to the short-term context in which the emergency pay measures were being imposed. In reality, they were doing their bit.

Brendan Howlin inherited that situation when he became Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. The day he took that job, and the first time he met the Troika who had arrived when all of Brian Lenihan’s attempts to shore up the economy failed, Howlin realised that this was no short-term crisis. He had been opposed to the emergency pay measures, and then realised he had no choice but to implement and drive them.

Brendan Howlin

It’s funny that it’s sort of forgotten now that in being forced to implement really tough pay cuts, throughout the public sector, Brendan Howlin kept the peace. Throughout the entire five year period he was in government, the toughest any Minister has seen, he kept lines of communication open. He was forceful and persuasive up close and personal, and always honest about what had to be done.

From the beginning he was clear that the pay cuts imposed in 2009 had to be unrolled when it was possible to do so, and he had begun the process before he left office. His management of an impossible situation contributed in no small measure to the fact that throughout that hard five years there was no industrial action at all, even though the public service pay and pensions bill was considerably smaller when he left office than it was at the start.

And he was helped by the fact that public servants essentially made a patriotic sacrifice. It drives me bananas when I hear people on the radio giving out about the greed of teachers or gardaí, or trying to start up that tired old public vs private mantra. If Ireland’s public servants hadn’t taken pay cuts on the chin, and endured them for seven years, we’d never have got out of the hole we were in. If they hadn’t carried on delivering, often under pressure, an economic recovery would never have happened.

So let’s face it — Ireland’s public servants are due a break. The question, I guess, is: ‘how is it to be engineered?’

As things stand, the likelihood is that there will be industrial action, in places we never wanted to see it. Nobody — least of all, I suspect, the gardaí — wants to see the streets of our towns and cities go without policing, even for a day. Nobody wants to see children sent home from school.

Preventing that involves management, and it involves accepting that there is a case to be answered. But it also involves recognising that we could be stepping on to a treadmill, where the settlement of one dispute immediately starts another, and where one pay increase becomes the basis for the next claim. We haven’t been there for many years, but those of us who are old enough to remember it can remember only too well how destructive that cycle was.

I worked as a public sector trade union official in the seventies and eighties. It was a time when pay settlements were judged by the amount of back money secured, and when negotiations often consisted of delivering the employer an ultimatum and then immediately following that with a spontaneous walking off the job.

Many of our members in those days had conditions that simply wouldn’t be put up with now. They were expected to work whatever shifts their employer wanted, with no recognition for Sunday or weekend or night work. But the more you managed to secure for one group of your members, the more discontented other groups would become. In the days before national agreements, the alternative was an endless and repetitive cycle of claims and disputes.

The big gap in where we are right now is a sustainable national approach. A public service pay commission has been established, but it will take time to prove its worth. It may (or may not) meet one of the central demands of the gardaí, for instance — the right to be respected at representing their own interests. But while it’s bedding in, there is a real risk of chaos, and the division that goes hand in hand with that.

We need a mechanism like the old employer/labour conference — an informal bit of machinery that hid in plain sight behind the formal mechanisms, and had the clout to get everyone around the table — or sometimes, when that was necessary for cosmetic reasons, around a complicated set of tables.

If I were the Taoiseach or the Minister for Public Expenditure right now, I’d be reaching out to the heads of both ICTU and IBEC, calling them together to see whether an informal intervention was possible in the short term. But I’d be just as interested in feeling them out about how we face the future, and we construct something sustainable but equitable to cover the next few years.

Pay is on the table now. Throughout the private sector there’s a bubbling up of pay pressure, and in the very large community and voluntary sector there’s a growing feeling that enough is enough. Saying that Haddington Road hasn’t expired yet simply won’t cut it.

Nobody wants to see the current skirmishes developing into a full-scale battle over pay and conditions. But tens of thousands of people who have been on frozen pay for seven or eight years (frozen at significantly less than they had) won’t wait much longer. In the absence of a new national agreement — which should be under negotiation now — we may have to face a lot worse.