The deadline for prison officers to accept a final pay deal offer has been extended for another 24 hours to allow the deal to be negotiated by national executive of the Prison Officers Association.
Minister for Justice Michael McDowell had laid down a 10-day deadline, which was due to expire today, in an attempt to resolve the long-running dispute.
But the POA said the Prison Service had accepted its need for more time to consider clarifications it had received today.
General secretary John Clinton said he would be holding a meeting of the POA national executive at 11am tomorrow to discuss the clarifications.
"We'll be sitting down and going through the issues," he said. The POA's national executive will have to decide whether to recommend the deal to its 3,200 members and to put it to them in a national ballot.
"On any issue of this magnitude, it's the members who decide," said Mr Clinton. He added that it was too early to say if the clarifications meant the deal would be acceptable to the executive and the members.
Prison officers have been offered essentially the same deal of annualised hours to cut the €60 million overtime bill, which they rejected overwhelmingly last April. But some tweaks have been made so that prison officers are not forced to work overtime.
Mr McDowell has warned that the deal represents the final window of opportunity for prisoner officers, after 300 meetings with the Prison Officers Association (POA), years of negotiations and the involvement of the Labour Relations Commission.
He has said that if the answer is 'no', he will go ahead with his plan to privatise prison escorts and to hand the running of the country's remaining open prisons - Loughan House in Co Cavan and Shelton Abbey in Co Wicklow - to an independent agency.
Mr McDowell has also raised the possibility of getting a private company to run the replacement for Mountjoy prison in Thornton in Dublin and the new prison planned for Spike Island in Cork.