PUBLIC patience with CIE and belief in its ability to restructure to meet competition took another battering this week. For the third time in three months, commuter services were disrupted because of an industrial relations breakdown.
On Wednesday, most of CIE's drivers defied their unions and their employer to take to the streets of Dublin and the Republic's main provincial centres. DART driver Mr Colm Allen summed up the mood: "If people think what happened in France was amazing they haven't seen anything. If our jobs and livelihood are threatened we will block every road in the city."
The example of the French truckers was on everybody's lips. Some of the placards read "Let's Do A France".
France, of course, is different. In France only 3 per cent of the truckers who blockaded ports and roads were in unions when the strike began. It was initially a weapon in their favour. They didn't know the rules of industrial relations and didn't care that they didn't.
It left the government facing hard choices. It eventually took the intervention and leadership of the French unions to deliver a settlement. It remains to be seen how long such an expensive deal for employers - and the taxpayer - can stick.
In Ireland, CIE is one of the most highly unionised companies, but on Wednesday the unions lost control. The reason was that threats of legal action by CIE's subsidiary companies against SIPTU and the National Bus and Rail Union had forced them to cancel their planned protest. Normally, that would have been the end of it, but this time bus and train drivers went on the streets and, like the French truckers, said to hell with the consequences.
It now looks as if there will be no consequences, at least of a disciplinary nature, for the workers. Local management in CIE's subsidiaries had advised against using legal threats to stop Wednesday's march and it looks as though the corporate strategists have learned their lesson. If they have, it should be possible, to quote one union source, to "squeeze the genie back in the bottle".
But the genie's compliance will depend on how far the company will go to bridge the enormous gap that has emerged between both sides on pay. CIE has to save £44 million a year in operating costs to make it competitive. Half of those savings, it says, must come in payroll costs.
By coincidence, overtime and shift premiums account for about half the wages of many drivers. The simple answer the company has come up with in its viability plans is to abolish overtime.
A train driver said: "My basic is less than £14,000 and I earned £26,000 last year. But I had to work 33 Sundays." Eliminating his overtime will also eliminate his ability to pay a mortgage and educate his children.
While the National Locomotive Drivers' Committee and the Busworkers' Action Group stole the headlines, the high turnout on the march was primarily due to shop stewards. Many of them felt their credibility with members was on the line if they obeyed union instructions and ordered members not to participate.
But the new rank and file organisations should not be written off. The NLDC in particular, reflects the views of many train drivers. It grew out of the disillusionment of Iarnrod Eireann drivers with the 1994 productivity, deal. Many of them voted against it, but were swamped in an aggregate vote of all company employees.
Their chairman, Brendan Ogle, says he is not a member of any political organisation and the committee is not being manipulated by anyone. "We may seem at the moment like left wing radicals, but I think if anyone was faced with the prospects we face they'd be converted into left wing radicals too, at least for a little while".
The NLDC is meeting in Dublin this Sunday to review the events of the last week and consider its options. On Monday the CIE unions get back to the more mundane task of trying to negotiate a deal that is palatable to the members and commercially viable for the company.
The omens are bad. Although there is a deadline of March 31st for a deal, both sides have yet to agree a principal facilitator to help them steer negotiations to an agreement. If they fail, the genie may escape from the bottle again. That could be the beginning of the end of the road for CIE.