RANK AND file gardaí have voted overwhelmingly in favour of taking industrial action over the imposition of the income and pension levies and the public sector pay cut, though fewer than 50 per cent of gardaí voted.
The Garda Representative Association (GRA) said 93 per cent of respondents to a survey of its members voted in favour of taking some form of industrial action, which will stop short of a withdrawal of service.
Association general secretary PJ Stone described the result as “positive”.
He believed the GRA national executive now had a “strong mandate” to plan the industrial action despite the survey’s low response rate, 5,540 of its 11,600 members.
Some 7.2 per cent voted to take no action; 65.4 per cent voted to engage in forms of industrial action to be decided by the GRA executive, but that stopped short of a withdrawal of services; 18.4 per cent voted for withdrawing their services, while 8.8 per cent specified “other actions” they believed should be taken.
Mr Stone said the form of industrial action gardaí would engage in had yet to be decided but would not compromise public safety.
The GRA national executive would outline a range of options to its annual delegate conference in April, and would ask delegates to decide which ones should be pursued. “We will choose [actions] that we can deliver on and ones that conference supports,” Mr Stone said.
It is believed gardaí could refuse to use their own phones and home computers for policing duties or fail to co-operate with planned rostering changes. Rank and file members could also refuse to work overtime.
He said gardaí were clearly deeply unhappy at the way their remuneration had been eroded.
His members were also unhappy that the GRA did not enjoy trade union status and so were excluded from talks on public sector savings late last year.
As well as taking industrial action over pay, the GRA will go before the courts next month for a judicial review of the pension levy. It was also considering a constitutional challenge to seek full trade union status and was willing to take its case to Europe.
Mr Stone said the right to trade union membership was being denied to gardaí at the same time that senior civil servants had been granted a “one to one” with Government Ministers to lobby them on exemptions to recent pay cuts.
Gardaí were seeing their pay cut while working to keep the public safe “from the daily ravages of criminality”.
The GRA in December announced plans to ballot its members on industrial action.
It was forced into a climbdown when Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern and Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy both pointed out that a member of the Garda withdrawing their service or inducing others to do so was committing a criminal offence.
The GRA then abandoned its ballot plans in favour of a survey. Mr Stone said he believed some members had not voted because of the strong opposition to the survey from Mr Ahern and Mr Murphy.
A spokesman for Mr Ahern said he had made his views about any planned GRA action known in December.