Dublin is the fastest-expanding urban centre in the State. This year alone 71 new hotels will be completed in the capital to cope with the tourist boom. The city now attracts four times the visitors it did a decade ago, there are twice as many cars on the roads, and the number of emergency calls has more than doubled.
Dublin Corporation, which is responsible for fire and emergency ambulance services in the greater Dublin area, wants to reorganise the fire brigade. SIPTU and IMPACT, the two unions representing the city's 900 firefighters, agree on the need for change. In fact they argue that they have already conceded substantial changes: providing offshore fire fighting services for the Irish Marine Rescue Service, the use of defibrillators for cardiac patients and the amalgamation of the Dublin and Dun Laoghaire services.
Management wants much more. For instance, it wants more civilians in areas like catering and clerical duties of the fire brigade, to free firefighters for the job they are trained to do. It wants them to perform extra duties at the stations when they are on standby at weekends. And it wants to make 64 of them redundant.
The gap is significant, but not insurmountable. Yet no breakthrough was achieved in long negotiations that included two full Labour Court hearings and direct talks chaired by a former senior trade unionist, Mr Charlie Douglas.
Yesterday, when both sides met to at least try to agree a level for emergency cover during the impending strike, they inevitably discussed a possible last-minute settlement to the dispute as well. It is in the nature of industrial disputes that, if they are to be settled ahead of a strike, they will be settled at the last minute.
In this case they were bedevilled by the firefighters' historic pay parity with the Garda. The link was never in dispute, but the Government's decision to give the Garda a "second bite at the cherry" after their "Blue Flu" action seriously complicated the situation. The 2 per cent awarded to the Garda as a down-payment on future productivity under any successor to Partnership 2000 made the productivity factor especially difficult to calculate.
Another complication was that Dublin Corporation, unlike the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue, could not go cap in hand to the Department of Finance looking for a subvention to top up the firefighters' pay. Most of any increase it agreed to pay would have to be recouped from the ratepayers.
If firefighters were angry at the corporation for seeking to reduce their numbers at a time when their workload was far greater than it was in 1990, management could point out that the city's revenue from rates was lower now than it was then.
Like the Garda, Dublin's firefighters often put their lives at risk when they answer an emergency call. But because their employer is one of the poor relations in the public service they believe they are being asked to give more productivity than gardai for the same money. Long-standing public-sector pay relativities were made to cope with a less complicated world.