CPSU ANNUAL CONFERENCE: INDUSTRIAL ACTION:THE GENERAL secretary of the Civil Public and Services Union (CPSU), Blair Horan, has apologised to members of the public who were caught up in the chaos at the Passport Office last week.
However, addressing his union’s annual conference in Galway, he said he would not apologise for the industrial action over pay cuts.
He said the current action had been under way for nine weeks before the Government had decided to engage in talks. It was “that fatal delay” that had led to the huge backlog in passport applications.
Mr Horan again blamed mismanagement by the Department of Foreign Affairs for the chaotic scenes in the Passport Office last Friday.
He said his union always took industrial action in a responsible way, and since the start of the current dispute his members had provided emergency cover for passports applicants. “If we are to take industrial action, who do we have to exclude? Do we exclude social welfare? Do we have to exclude any activity that will have any impact on the public?”
He added: “We will not agree that somehow people in social welfare can be affected but people who for some reason need a passport cannot be affected.”
Mr Horan said he did not want anybody to interpret the changes the union made in its campaign in the Passport Office this week “as a lack of resolve”.
“Some people say we should have taken strike action. But, of course, if we took strike action nobody would get their passport at all.
“I want to make it very clear this dispute will continue, including in the Passport Office, until we get a settlement from the current talks that is acceptable to lower-paid workers.”
Mr Horan also told the conference that the Government decision to row back on pay cuts originally earmarked for assistant secretaries in the Civil Service to take account of the abolition of a bonus scheme “has done more than anything else to inflame the anger of our members”.
He produced figures on staffing levels in the Civil Service over the last decade or so which showed that while the number of clerical officers had risen by about 14 per cent, there was a 60 per cent rise in the number of assistant secretaries, while the total number of assistant principal officers and principal officers had more than doubled.
“Top civil servants played their part in wrecking this economy, and they had a party for themselves while they were doing it,” he said.
The president of the CPSU, Denis Walshe, said the public, thanks to misinformation, currently regarded civil servants as “lazy ne’er-do-wells who are impeding their constitutional rights to a passport and travel abroad”.
He said pundits were saying that his members should be grateful to have jobs. “The reality is that the country should be grateful that we are there to do those jobs.”
He said, for example, it was CPSU members who made sure pensioners got their pensions.
If the Government did not give his members their due “then, colleagues, we will cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war”.