Taoiseach urges end to post dispute

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern urged all those involved to ensure an end to the dispute at An Post.

"Nobody will win in a strike action," he said. "An Post will lose business. The Labour Court has given the blueprint for a settlement." He said the issue had been examined at enormous length.

Mr Ahern said nobody wanted to see an unhappy situation for management and workers and the best way they could resolve matters was by moving forward together, implementing their programme for change, trying to generate new business and dealing with outstanding issues.

"It is best done in that calm environment and using the conciliation services of the State in assisting them to do that," he said.

Joe Higgins, Socialist Party, Dublin West, said 8,000 postal workers had been "insulted, bullied and threatened" because they had dared to exercise a democratic right to vote for industrial action over a pay dispute.

He asked Mr Ahern if he endorsed the threat by Minister for Communications Noel Dempsey to privatise the postal service, "because post office workers demand a single-figure wage increase, which the policy of your Government, called partnership, awarded all workers three years ago in the Sustaining Progress agreement which has not been paid".

He said "scandalously" An Post's pensioners had equally been denied the increase in order to try and blackmail their working colleagues.

He asked if the Minister for Communications had any moral authority in attacking workers to whom the State owned substantial amounts of money.

"We remember his most recent big idea has left the taxpayer with about €52 million worth of obsolete chunks of scrap metal languishing in air-conditioned warehouses at a cost of a further €1 million to the taxpayer," he said.

"They were supposed to be used for voting or something, if I remember correctly."

Mr Higgins said members of Siptu were refusing to go into talks for a new agreement when there was "this kind of blatant reneging of the last agreement, which still has not been honoured, and the routine replacement of trade-unionised jobs and rates of pay for semi-slave labour".

He said the Taoiseach should instruct An Post to pay its employees and pensioners what they were due. He also called on Mr Ahern to introduce legislation to outlaw the replacement of established jobs with semi-bonded labour and the "grotesque" exploitation of migrant workers which that meant.

Mr Ahern said Mr Dempsey had spent an enormous amount of time in recent months, and throughout the year, in working with An Post's management and the trade unions. An Post knew it had to change, said Mr Ahern, and that there were issues creating difficulty.

"The blueprint for the settlement of the dispute is the Labour Court recommendation and, as I have always done in this House, I stand over Labour Court recommendations," he said.