Employers and trade unions have been invited back to the Labour Court next Tuesday for talks in another effort to solve the bitter dispute over engineers' pay which has left most lifts at Ballymun out of order.
The strike, now in its fifth week, is by lift and escalator engineers at eight companies nationwide and started officially on Monday, July 13th.
However, the dispute affecting Ballymun involves one of those companies, Pickering Lifts Ltd, and industrial action started there on June 30th.
Efforts to solve the dispute were made last weekend when a politician, understood to be Ms Roisin Shortall, the Labour TD, was asked to act as mediator. However, this fell through and no meeting took place.
Yesterday the Minister for Labour, Trade and Consumer Affairs, Mr Tom Kitt, called on both sides to resolve their differences. No useful purpose was served by the stand-off between the parties, he said.
The assistant general secretary of the TEEU, Mr Dan Miller, said yesterday he had been in Dublin for the past few weeks to be ready for any meeting with members of IBEC, but had not been approached.
He said they had tried to get a politician to broker talks between the two sides at the weekend. However, more preconditions had been added by the other side.
"The case has already been before the Labour Court, but there were strings attached to the recommendation which would have disadvantaged the engineers," Mr Miller said.
He said he did not want a strike and certainly did not want the people of Ballymun to suffer.
Mr Miller claimed the employers' side had a hidden agenda.
Mr John Doherty of IBEC said that, as he understood it, the union approached a number of companies at the weekend, saying they wanted a third party to try to mediate a settlement.
He said IBEC had sought every avenue to avoid this strike by direct negotiation and through the Labour Court which issued a recommendation accepted by IBEC.
A number of Ballymun residents went to Pickerings Lifts, Dunboyne, yesterday to show support for the lift strikers.
A spokesman said they rejected any attempt to set them against the strikers. The lifts had been neglected for years and some were 30 years old.