Tension between the Government and trade unions over Partnership 2000 has intensified as the social partners prepare for today's review of the deal in Dublin Castle.
Against a background of growing union unrest over wage restraint, it emerged last night that the Taoiseach will ask today's meeting if new and radical mechanisms should be found to deal with public sector pay to ensure that a successor to Partnership 2000 works.
Mr Ahern yesterday briefed his Cabinet colleagues on today's four-hour meeting, and it is understood his message to the social partners will focus on the need for "responsibility" on all sides.
Mr Ahern said he would listen to what the SIPTU president, Mr Jimmy Somers, and other trade union leaders had to say, but he insisted that taxes would have to be reduced "in a prudent way" and that the Government must keep fiscal control tight if the Irish economy was to remain the healthiest of the OECD countries.
The benefits accruing in recent years must be spent wisely, he said. "Having 10 years ago managed the problems of economic failure, we now have to manage economic success."
Denying there would be any reopening of the Programme for Competitiveness and Work or Partnership 2000, Government sources last night said it now appeared a "total change" might be necessary in the way public sector pay deals were handled in a future agreement.
Every national agreement since 1987 has experienced a "mid-life crisis" in its second year, but the pressures being experienced by Partnership 2000 are more serious than on any previous occasion. Nine days ago the general secretary of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, Mr Joe O'Toole, raised those pressures significantly by warning the Government to expect a teachers' pay claim once the Garda pay dispute was over.
Today Mr Ahern is expected to indicate that a more flexible approach to public sector pay bargaining is possible under Partnership 2000, so long as the unions are willing to provide significantly more productivity than under the PCW.
The Tanaiste, Ms Harney, is to address the equally thorny issues of trade union recognition and the timetable for introducing the National Minimum Wage.
The response from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions will be determined as much by Ms Harney's stance as by Mr Ahern's.
Last night Mr Somers, who will be a member of the ICTU delegation today, warned that significant tax reforms and union recognition remained two crucial issues on which Partnership 2000 could stand or fall. He said the Government must move from being a "facilitator" in the discussions between unions and employers on trade union recognition to actively seeking solutions.
On tax reform Mr Somers said: "There could be no more devastating indictment of Government financial policy than the fact that the principal task facing this one is to undo the damage of last year's socially divisive Budget."
Acknowledging the existence of some inflationary pressures, Mr Ahern said these had more to do with sterling and the currencies of Ireland's main trading partners than anything else. However, there were some indications of price increases across a range of areas as well as signals of price inflation through wages.
Rejecting Mr Somers's claims that the last Budget was socially divisive, the Taoiseach said the vast majority of SIPTU members were on the higher rate of tax. Employer bodies, farming organisations and those representing the voluntary sector, or "Third Strand" of Partnership 2000, are also expected to raise their concerns. The outcome will depend on how far Mr Ahern can assure all these groups that their agendas will be addressed over the remaining two years of the agreement.