Prison officers staged a walk-out when the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, was due to speak at their annual conference in Galway yesterday.
At least 100 of the 120 Prison Officers' Association (POA) delegates participated in the demonstration. They said it was in protest at the Minister's use of the media to announce that he has no money for overtime.
The Minister has given the POA 90 days to sort out the issue of overtime, describing the budget for it as "insatiable and indefensible".
The POA president, Mr Gabriel Keaveny, and executive members remained in the room, but Mr Keaveny formally rebuked Mr McDowell over a report in yesterday's Examiner newspaper. "Public relations may be important, Minister, but believe me, so are industrial relations - a major responsibility for any Minister," the POA president said.
In his address to the conference, Mr McDowell said "all other expenditure items" in the Prison Service budget were being dictated by the overtime issue.
"Resources needed for training, capital programmes, rehabilitation programmes, education, and modernisation are being cannibalised to feed the insatiable and indefensible overtime budget. There will be no - absolutely no - additional resources provided by way of supplementary estimate, unlike in previous years when the provision of supplementary resources in the course of any given financial year was commonplace."
Prison officers' overtime had risen by 62 per cent between 1997 and 2002, from €36 .6 million to €59.3 million. He said management had now put together a framework proposal which the director-general of the Prison Service would present to the POA executive and its members by the end of next week.
The Minister said the proposal involved elimination of overtime working through introduction of an annualised hours system of attendance, based on the SORT report recommendations.
The system envisaged staff contracting to work certain levels of additional hours which would be paid for whether or not they were worked. It also involved the payment of lump sums to staff subject to the delivery of specific commitments.
"By the end of July, a 90-day process of consideration and decision must conclude,"the Minister warned. "By then, money and time will have run out. By the beginning of September, I have to be in a position to implement what we have agreed in the meantime or, if no agreement has been reached, to act by myself to address what will by then have become an unavoidable and critical imperative."