Analysis: Garda compromise may end up pleasing nobody

Ministers heaved a sigh of relief when the news finally came through that the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors had joined the Garda Representative Association in accepting a pay award.

The decisions to accept the Labour Court’s recommendation, made by comfortable margins, have averted the prospect of a strike by the Garda Síochána, a prospect that had terrified them last month.

Most Ministers – and many senior officials – remain profoundly shocked that gardaí would be prepared to disregard their orders and circumvent their oath but they have long since accepted that the strike threat was real.

Most Ministers believed that they had to do everything they could to avoid it. For one Minister, however, the decision is not the end of a problem – but rather the beginning of another potentially protracted and certainly expensive one.

Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe now faces claims from the unions representing 300,000 or so public sector workers who are not gardaí, who remain furious that Ministers have bowed.

A process will shortly begin with the Department of Public Expenditure, which will examine if the Lansdowne Road Agreement should provide for similar pay boosts for non-gardaí in the public service.

And that translates into a big problem for Donohoe who has set his budget limits for next year, but now finds that they are under extreme pressure even before the year begins.

Political difficulty

The public sector has made it clear that they will need “money on the table” to satisfy demands. Equally, Donohoe is clear that he cannot rewrite his budget to cope with mushrooming public pay demands.

The political difficulty is that both of these positions are grounded in fact.

Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has proved adept at finding money to solve political problems. The final budget in October 2015 of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government doubled the size of that budget giveaway to €3 billion with last-minute supplementary additions .

This October, Noonan found an extra €300 million to smooth the passage of the budget by actions that led the Fiscal Advisory Council, the Government's own watchdog, to tut-tut its disapproval.

But it will be hard, in the wake of that wheeze, to find another few hundred million for grumpy public servants.But Donohoe doesn’t have the money to commit – or at least, not without raiding other budgets that would cause consternation to his Cabinet colleagues and threaten to pull the Government apart.

Satisfy demands

How exactly he will satisfy demands while maintaining some semblance of budgetary discipline will be one of the defining challenges for the Government in 2017. For Donohoe, it may well be the making or breaking of him as a Minister.

And in the background, the commission on public sector pay, examining just how pay and conditions in the public sector compares with the private sector and with public jobs elsewhere, will be doing its work.

What will Donohoe do if the commission comes back and says that public sector workers are better paid, better treated and better pensioned than everyone else? The eventual compromise might well end up pleasing nobody.