MINISTER FOR Public Reform Brendan Howlin has warned that public sector unions that refuse to co-operate on the Croke Park agreement will leave their members open to further pay cuts and loss of job security.
Mr Howlin said last night the agreement was the only vehicle available to achieve the required savings and efficiencies and the reduction in numbers employed in the public sector.
"If people don't want to buy into that, well then they won't be protected by the protection measures that are implicit in the Croke Park agreement," he told RTÉ 1 television's The Week in Politics.
Mr Howlin was responding to the decision by members of the Civil Public and Services Union to vote for withholding co-operation on reforms under the deal. The union, which represents 13,000 lower-paid staff in the Civil Service, voted against the reforms outlined in the agreement at its annual conference in Athlone.
Mr Howlin last night said he understood people felt when their wages were falling “that their standard of living is such that they are barely able to meet their bills”.
“It is understandable that there is resistance but we have to get, as a country, to the aim of a balanced budget. There is no long-term prospect of other people paying our bills,” he said. “We will not have to resort, I hope, to further wage cuts because I know how painful that is and I know how marginal some people’s incomes are.”
Mr Howlin is one of a series of senior Ministers – including Michael Noonan, Pat Rabbitte and Ruairí Quinn – who have expressed concerns in recent days about the rate of progress of the talks between public service managers and unions over the issues of reducing employee numbers and finding new efficiencies.
Mr Rabbitte said on Saturday it seemed to him that the participants “were making haste slowly”.
Kieran Mulvey, head of the Labour Relations Commission, suggested longer working hours could be one of the outcomes of negotiations under the Croke Park agreement. He also expressed concern about the pace of progress.
“One would have thought we’d have been further along the line of public service reform.”
On the same RTÉ programme, Mr Mulvey referred to the EU- IMF programme, which stipulates that pay cuts must be broached by October this year if the parties fail to reach the required efficiencies and reduction in numbers.
“There is a burning platform, it’s called €52 billion of expenditure with €32 billion of income, and we have to face very severe facts around this. Nobody wants any more pay cuts, but we can change the way we work.”
Separately, David Begg of Ictu has suggested a period of up to 90 years for Ireland to pay off its debts. He argued it was wholly unsustainable for the State to pay its accumulated levels of debt over the period that was agreed.
"I don't think we can pay this off in any short period of time," he said on RTÉ Radio 1's This Week.
“Our only hope is to almost treat it like war reparations – you know, the Germans have only recently finished paying off the first World War. We really have to look at it as something on that scale and stretch it out.”
Mr Begg also criticised the European Central Bank, which he said was partly responsible for the crisis.