It was a balmy October day outside, with a gentle breeze still in the early stages of negotiating severance terms for the leaves left on trees.
But inside the Dáil, the looming strike of 300,000 public service workers provoked chilly exchanges at Leaders’ Questions, during which the Opposition predicted “a winter of discontent”.
Evoking the now-distant days of summer, a rueful Mary Lou McDonald told the Taoiseach he had had four months to avert the crisis – ever since the last pay agreement expired in June.
Instead of “statesmanship”, however, he had chosen “brinkmanship”. That and “playing chicken”. Now, McDonald implied, the chicken games were coming home to roost.
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Whatever about the chickens, Micheál Martin remained unflappable throughout. Only his innocence seemed injured. More than once, he spoke of the “enhanced social dialogue” he had offered trade unions in vain.
[ Government renews calls for unions to enter talks ‘immediately’ ahead of planned strike ]
On the eve of Wednesday’s other big event, the International AI Summit, the Taoiseach’s enhanced social dialogue (ESD) sounded like a next-generation chatbot.
But the unions were not interested in access to his superintelligence, apparently. And unimpressed by Martin’s smooth replies, the Sinn Féin leader wanted to be put straight through to a human, too. This was the “11th hour”, she said.
Such was the sense of urgency that, for once, the first item on the agenda of Irish politics was no longer the split. “The first item on the agenda is pay,” McDonald said. “That’s always the case with pay talks,” Martin agreed.
Most party leaders concentrated their Leaders’ Questions on the strike. The exception was Aontú’s Peadar Tóibín, whose question was not so much a question as an attempted drive-by character assassination of the entire Cabinet.
It was Tóibín who predicted a discontented winter. But starting the storms early and gusting to Force 10, he blasted the Justice minister (for the Garda whistleblower controversy), the Health minister (for the children’s hospital debacle), the Children, Disability and Equality minister (for an “omnishambles”) and the Social Protection minister (for wasting 100,000 school meals a day).
There may have been others targeted in the three-minute fusillade, but it was hard to keep up. Even the Taoiseach’s advanced ESD software struggled to cope.
Remarkably, though, Tóibín had also somehow found time to mention Drumcree. He accused Martin of having “stood idly by” during the standoff, then basking in the glory afterwards.
The reference to a previous Cork taoiseach, circa 1970, and a time when the split really was the first item on the agenda, may or may not have been deliberate.
Either way, this was the nearest Martin came to sounding annoyed. “No one stood idly by in Drumcree,” he said. His cautious approach had been dictated by concern about future relations. As he summed up his Garvaghy Road strategy, semi-cryptically: “I looked around the corner.”
That may have been more of his ESD. Conversely, he accused the Aontú chatbot of an over-reliance on SDS: “simplistic derogatory soundbites”.
Back on the main theme, The Social Democrats’ Cian O’Callaghan also characterised the strike in poultry terms. The Taoiseach had been “playing chicken” with the unions and now the game was “down to the wire” (the chicken-wire, presumably).
All party leaders prefaced their questions with words about the tragic events in Waterford. In expressing sympathy with the “first responders”, Ivana Bacik said theirs were among the professions driven to strike.
Her claims of the Government’s disregard for public servants, however, provoked a religious response from the Taoiseach.
“For God’s sake,” he said, stopping just short of claiming credit for the size of the strike while pointing out that public service employment had expanded by 80,000 in five years. Eschewing chicken metaphors, meanwhile, the Labour leader told him it was time to lose the poker face and put “cards on the table”.
