Brendan Howlin against plan to use Garda Reserve

The deployment of Garda reservists will not reassure people about public safety if the threatened strike goes ahead, Labour leader Brendan Howlin has warned.

He said the Government’s public pay commission would not report before next summer and “that’s hardly likely to give any assistance to the State in its current issues”.

Mr Howlin criticised the plan to deploy up to 2,000 reservists after an estimated 2,000 sergeants and inspectors decided to join the 10,500 rank and file gardaí in 24-hour strikes from 7am on the four Fridays in November.

He warned that “striking bilateral deals with any single union is not the way forward” and said there should be a clear pathway to full pay restoration and an unwinding “in an orderly and affordable way” of the emergency legislation that cut €2 billion in public sector wages.

Lansdowne Road

Mr Howlin asked “does the Government intend to make any decisions to avoid the unravelling the hard-won Lansdowne Road Agreement”.

“The overall response of Government to date is to repeat ad nauseam that the Lansdowne Road Agreement is the only deal in town.”

During leaders’ questions in the Dáil, he said “the deployment of reservists who do not have the power of arrest will not reassure people that public safety will be preserved”.

The former minister, who negotiated the Lansdowne Road pay deal, said Taoiseach Enda Kenny would not accept a proposal for the agreement to be accelerated, and to allow for a successor deal.

Public pay commission

“You won’t accept a proposal relating to a new social dialogue and the Tánaiste appears in no rush to grant rights to gardaí to avail of the machinery of trade unions,” Mr Howlin said.

Mr Kenny told him the Government had approved the establishment of a public pay commission.

But he added: “I want to make it perfectly clear that there are constraints on the public purse and we are not in a position to meet claims outside the Lansdowne Road Agreement.”

Mr Kenny said the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald is to meet the Garda Representative Association this week and had invited the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors.

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said "one of the several issues at the heart of this looming industrial action and the anger and frustration felt by teachers, by gardaí and by nurses is the issue of equality in pay" and the reduced starting pay rate for gardaí, teachers and nurses.

“It breaches the fundamental principle of equality,” he said, asking Mr Kenny “will you commit to ending the pay apartheid”?

Mr Kenny told him it was a matter of serious concerns for teachers that the TUI and INTO sat down with the Department of Education and a new deal for emerging teachers was implemented and that deal was on offer for the TUI.