PD rally:Public servants will not get a 35-hour week if the Progressive Democrats are re-elected, the party leader and Tánaiste, Michael McDowell, said last night.
Noting that France was pulling back from a 35-hour week, Mr McDowell said a general extension of the 35-hour week throughout the public service would be "another step in making Ireland less competitive".
"The difference between a 39 and a 35-hour week effectively means one month's extra paid holiday. If we do that, we will be sending a message to the private sector that they are to be the engine of a machine where they don't benefit and the State is administered at great cost to the private sector," Mr McDowell said.
Faced with nurses' demands for a 35-hour week, he said Minister for Health and Children Mary Harney was "not willing to open the floodgates", but she was prepared to examine proposals that do not cost the exchequer.
"The answer for Ireland is not that we begin to work less hard. We have to remain competitive," he said, adding that a Rainbow-led government would "raise the cost of running Ireland at the expense of the private sector".
Voters, he told a gathering of party election workers in Dublin last night, would elect a weak, inexperienced and divided government if they elected Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens.
Labour, he said, "will take their instructions from their paymasters in Liberty Hall", while the three parties are divided on key policies, such as the European Union, road building and energy.
If voters had displayed an appetite for change early on in the campaign, Ms Harney said, the appetite had "well and truly evaporated over the last few days".