Howlin still aiming for €300m in pay bill savings

Confidence that the new deal offered to the public service will deliver the planned €300 million in savings this year has been expressed by Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin.

Speaking after delivering a comprehensive briefing to his Cabinet colleagues on the concluding phase of the negotiations with public service unions, Mr Howlin said that legislation to underpin the deal will be published tomorrow.

The legislation will provide for compulsory redundancies in the public service in the event that the latest deal is not accepted by trade union members.

After briefing the Cabinet, Mr Howlin said achieving savings of €300 million this year and €1 billion over three years was still his objective. He said that, while a considerable amount of number-crunching remained to be done, he had never strayed from the overall objective through the process.

The Minister said that an agreement was very important for the country as it would maintain industrial peace in the public service and send out signals that people could invest with confidence in this country.

Troika programme
"We are now as an economy well on the way to seeing an exit from the troika programme and getting back on the road to growth. These are extremely important steps in fulfilling that commitment we made to the Irish people on taking office in 2011," he said.

The Minister thanked all those involved in the talks, particularly the Labour Relations Commission, which facilitated the discussions, and he repeated that the Government had sought at all times to make the necessary savings by agreement.

He said that if the proposals were accepted it would be possible to achieve the required savings and major increases in public service productivity.

“The essential elements and protection of the Croke Park agreement will remain in place. That will benefit both people working in the public service and all of us who rely on public services,” he said.

“From the national perspective, industrial peace in the public service can be secured at a critical time in our path to economic recovery.”

Mr Howlin said the Cabinet had also approved the text and publication of legislation to give effect to pay reductions for those earning more than €65,000, the parallel reduction in public service pensions and other contingent measures, including compulsory redundancies, to enable the Government to achieve its savings requirements in the event of non-ratification of collective agreements.

He said it was now a matter for each union to take the agreement to its members or executive for a decision.

'An advance'
The country's largest trade union, Siptu, said the revised Croke Park II proposals involved "an advance" on those that were rejected by its members last month. Siptu's national executive council will consider the proposals tomorrow.

General secretary of the Irish Nurses’ and Midwives’ Organisation Liam Doran said he was mainly pleased with the revised deal.

"The main concessions [we won] are double time and premium pay. Double time on Sundays and public holidays – that was a permanent pay cut to over 7.75 per cent of our members – that has been restored."

Backward step
However, he described the new 39-hour working week as "a significant backward step".

Steve Tweed, the director of industrial relations at the Irish Medical Organisation, said it was satisfied that it had secured significant improvements in the revised proposals.

“We’re not happy with everything we have secured but we are happy that we have secured a much better set of proposals than were on offer two months ago,” he said.

The Unite trade union said in a preliminary response that “there appeared to be nothing substantially new in the proposals”.

The general secretary of the Irish Federation of University Teachers, Mike Jennings, said the revised proposals represented "some improvement on the previously rejected document".

However, he said it would ultimately be for members to decide if the improvements were sufficient to make a fundamental difference to its position and to alter the previous decision of the membership.