Taoiseach Brian Cowen has said the country's unions should see the public service pay deal negotiated in Croke Park last week as the "best available" under current economic circumstances.
Commenting after public service representatives of the Unite trade union voted to recommend the rejection by their union of the proposed new agreement, Mr Cowen said he hoped the country's unions would accept the deal.
"I hope that they can look at this deal as what is available, what can best be negotiated under present circumstances".
"We want to see the country moving forward. I believe we can and will move forward again in the future and all of those extra resources that can be allocated from that we can return to some of these issues at another time," he added.
The Unite vote was taken at a meeting in Dublin this afternoon and follows yesterday's rejection of the deal by the executive of Impact, the country’s largest public sector union. Unite's executive is scheduled to meet on Monday to determine its position on the Croke Park deal.
The union, which was formed in May 2007 following a merger between the T&GWU and Amicus, represents some 6,000 public service workers across the health, local authority and education sectors.
Unite regional secretary Jimmy Kelly said the biggest issue prompting his members to reject the deal was the failure of the Government to reverse the pay cuts immediately in return for co-operation with reform.
Commenting on the decision, he said: "The promise of jam tomorrow is wholly undermined by inactions taking place in banking and insurance."
Following a four-hour meeting yesterday afternoon, the 23-member central executive committee of Impact said the proposed deal "did not provide the certainty that its members had sought over pay, pensions and job security".
This morning, Impact general secretary-designate Shay Cody told RTÉ's Morning Ireland: "The difficulty is that public service workers are being asked to sign up to a changed programme and there is uncertainty about how far that's going to go".
He said there was no certainty that the government would honour its commitments if public servants delivered their side of the bargain, that the government would honour its commitments.
"There is no commitment ultimately on the part of the government that if public servants deliver savings of €100/€200/€300 million over the next 12 months that any of that will come back in the form of pay to public service workers," he added.
Last night he told the The Irish Times that the executive believed it could not "sell" the deal to members.
Impact is to ballot its 55,000 public service members on the deal over the next few weeks and a result is expected by mid-May.
In the meantime, the industrial action that its members have been engaged in for nearly two months will continue.
Mr Cody said the committee had concerns that while public servants would meet their side of the bargain, there was no certainty the Government would honour its part.
Mr Cody said the Government’s handling of the banking crisis had also played a significant part in the executive’s decision to reject the deal. He described as a “catastrophic issue” the decision of Anglo Irish Bank to award pay increases to some of its staff.
Impact general secretary Peter McLoone, who is also chairman of the public service committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu), was one of the main architects of the deal brokered at Croke Park last week and it was widely expected that the union’s executive would back the proposals agreed.
Separately yesterday, the executive of the union representing higher civil servants, AHPS, is to recommend acceptance of the Croke Park deal in a ballot of members. The leadership of the primary teachers’ union INTO and the Public Service Executive Union, which represents mid-ranking civil servants, have backed the deal. But members of the other teaching unions, the TUI and ASTI, rejected it at their conferences.
Siptu president Jack O’Connor has warned that the rejection of the proposed deal could result in an even worse outcome for public servants.
A message from Mr O’Connor to Siptu members, published yesterday in the union’s Liberty newsletter, said the Government was committed to a fiscal plan which entailed further cuts in 2011 and 2012 and that public servants could have their salaries reduced even further if the pay and reform deal was not implemented.
“We can escalate the action which is at the point of moving to extensive withdrawals of labour. This could result in a better outcome but it will not produce reinstatement of the pay scales in the short term,” he said.
Earlier yesterday, Taoiseach Brian Cowen said he was confident that public sector employees would view it as “the best that can be achieved in present circumstances. What’s important is that unions and their executives and ordinary members have to be given an opportunity to reflect on the job security that [the agreement] provides,” he said.