WERE in real danger of talking ourselves out of a new national agreement before the negotiations commence," warns the new general secretary of IMPACT, Mr Peter McLoone. This year he will play a central role in talks on a successor to the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW), if indeed there are any talks.

At this week's IMPACT conference he formally took over as general secretary from Mr Phil Flynn. But he has gradually been assuming responsibility for the union's affairs since he was made general secretary designate in April 1995.

Earlier this month, he also became chairman of the Public Services Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. As Such he will not only play a key role in negotiations on a successor to the PCW, but will also help iron out the increasingly stubborn creases in the latter agreement. Indeed, when he spoke to The Irish Times this week, he made it clear. there would be no new agreement until all the "unfinished business" in the PCW was sorted out.

An important element may prove to be finding the arbitration system which is now been set up to deal with the impasse that has arisen in restructuring deals involving nurses and low-paid civil servants. Other important groups in the public service, including most of IMPACT's members, are now backed up behind the nurses.

As chairman of the Public Services Committee, Mr McLoone will be intimately involved in the exercise to find out if the temporary arbitration system is feasible. He has no doubt that a revived conciliation and arbitration system is "essential in any post-PCW scenario".

It's absence has meant that public sector workers have found themselves, despite the much heralded "special" pay deals, locked into an increasingly inflexible system of national agreements - at least on the pay issue.

"The issue to be decided in the next few months will he whether there is a future for centralised bargaining," Mr McLoone says. "I take the view that there is.

"What we're proposing is that, between now and the special ICTU delegate conference in September, we will have a debate in the union on the pros and cons of centralised bargaining based on 10 years experience and the prospects facing us now.

"My own view is that the union is unlikely not to support the idea of negotiations with the Government. I think what we'll seek at grass roots level is to influence the agenda to a greater degree than when the PNR (Programme for National Recovery) and PESP (Programme for Economic and Social Progress) were negotiated.

"Members will want particular issues brought on board. Employment and taxation will continue to be big issues, notwithstanding the attention pay is getting at the moment.

"I believe that for public servants the issue of conciliation and arbitration machinery and a process for determining public service pay will be another major items. If we don't get that provision right it will put seriously at risk the prospect of a new national agreement.

Turning to the current disputes he says that, "Teachers, nurses and lower paid civil servants have to be put in context. The only significant group to have been sorted out are executive officers and higher executive officers in the civil service.

"Everything else is stockpiled behind everything else. If the teachers and nurses are sorted out, there is no guarantee we won't run into similar difficulties with other groups."

Although restructuring deals are supposed to break the traditional linkages between public service groups, Mr McLoone accepts that each successive wave of workers will seek to do at least as well as the groups which concluded agreements ahead of them.

He puts primary responsibility for failing "to break the links" in PCW restructuring deals on management. "One of the strongest criticisms we've made is that the PCW lacked any strategy on the management side.

"If the process was about breaking linkages, our experience, in fact, was that we made little or no progress because they had no strategy except `Let's wait and see how, negotiations on other pivotal groups work out.'

"Despite the declared intention that it was about breaking linkages, there was an overall ceiling on linkages from the Department of Finance. It didn't matter how much flexibility could be offered, the bottom line did not go above a three or threeish per cent increase."

Even in areas where IMPACT members such as Environmental Health Officers more than met the criteria for restructuring deals - such as the need for real flexibility, contributing to change and making significant savings - "talks broke down last November because we were told that three per cent was all there was on offer.

"Hospital pharmacists were another group prepared to contribute to change and achieve real savings in quite a significant way. And yet, when it came to a restructuring deal it was made quite clear at the outset `There's a limit here and we're not going to be able to change it'.

"We need greater flexibility than we've experienced in the first 20 months of this agreement if the PCW is to succeed.

It's on this basis that he believes the introduction of the arbitration system for restructuring deals is neccessary.

"The view I've taken is that you have to look at the existing process and one of the great weaknesses is there is nowhere to go in the event of an impasse.

"We need a process within which the expectations of public service workers and Government objectives can be dealt with." With hindsight, the presence of an arbitrator would have meant that groups like teachers, nurses and civil servants had "somewhere to go" when negotiations failed.

PRESSURE for some sort of arbitration process before either the civil servants or nurses are locked into a strike situation has been mounting. Mr McLoone feels that this week's joint Government/ICTU commitment to allow third-party adjudication in restructuring deals will help the situation. He says a decision about whether arbitration should be binding is not needed at this stage.

Asked if the Government does not have a case in saying that groups like the nurses are threatening to break the industrial peace clause of the PCW, Mr McLoone says: "Simply wagging a finger at people is not an adequate response to the problems we face. We have to put in place things that provide alternatives.

"The ballots for strike action are being held on the basis that procedures have reached the end of the line."

He also accepts that in the private sector there is understandable discontent at the rigidity of the pay terms of the PCW. "It's already clear that any future agreement will need some provision for processing individual pay claims. If there is to be a future national agreement, the pay provisions cannot be as inflexible as the PCW.

"Where the economy is in a state of growth and profits booming in industrial firms, there have to be procedures for workers to get a share of that." In the past, people were told there was "only one level of increase and only one. People's acceptance of that is gone. We need greater flexibility at local level to deal with genuine differences and employments."

So is a new agreement possible? "We're in real danger of talking ourselves out of a new agreement before negotiations commence. We have no option but to find a way out of the present impasse because the consequences of the alternative are too horrendous to think about.

"I think there are enough of us around from the 1970s and 1980s to remember the alternatives."