Tánaiste says Haddington Road deal will not be renegotiated

Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has said the Government will not renegotiate the Haddington Road agreement, backing comments by the Taoiseach that the cutbacks in the agreement must be made.

Mr Gilmore said the agreement was negotiated between the Government and the trade unions, all but one of which accepted it.

'The ASTI'
"It is in place. We, of course, respect the right of the individual union, the ASTI, not to accept the Haddington Road agreement," he said, speaking in New York where he is attending the UN General Assembly, but stressed the Government would not reopen discussions on the agreement. Mr Gilmore said the Government had not yet made a decision on what the total fiscal adjustment would be in next month's budget but repeated he believed it did not have to be as high as €3.1 billion.

Suggestions that the adjustment could not be far below €3 billion were “purely speculative,” he said, because the figure would not be decided until “much closer” to budget day on October 15th.

“We’re not going to be in a position to do it anyway until closer to budget day because in order to get the budget right, you have to have the most recent information available for forecasts and projections,” he said.

Labour has not publicly disclosed the total budgetary adjustment figure it is seeking as part of the Government's efforts to reach a deficit target of 5.1 per cent next year. Mr Gilmore is on four-day trip to New York where he will address the UN General Assembly on Saturday.

He will meet Iranian foreign minister Mohammed Javad Zarif today, just two days after US president Barack Obama said that he was willing to open talks with Iran to settle their nuclear dispute.

Foreign policy
Ireland's "strong" foreign policy history of promoting peaceful resolution gave the country a role in diplomatic negotiations in the stand-off over Iran's nuclear programme and Syria's civil war.

Speaking after pledging €200,000 of Government funding towards the cost of destroying Syria's chemical weapons under an international peace deal, he said Ireland has consistently argued for a political resolution.