The president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Peter McLoone, has said the consequences would be horrendous if the current talks aimed at resolving the nurses' dispute fail.
Speaking at the annual conference of the Public Service Executive Union in Killarney last night, Mr McLoone said the forthcoming weekend, when talks on the dispute are scheduled to resume, would be one of the most critical that many in the trade union movement had experienced for some time.
Mr McLoone is a member of the National Implementation Body, the main trouble-shooting mechanism of social partnership which has been seeking to broker an agreement between nursing unions and health service management over recent days. "We face going into this weekend having to find a solution. If we do not the consequences will be horrendous, not only for the future of social partnership but also for the way we in the public service do business with the Government."
In his address to the conference, Mr McLoone said public service unions should reclaim the change agenda and stop agreeing with those advocating change for change sake.
"For too long we have left it to management and politicians to define the so-called modernisation agenda in public services. And, too often, their agenda has delivered little in terms of improved services on the ground.
"When we negotiated Sustaining Progress and Towards 2016 [the two most recent national agreements] it was senior public service managers who drew up the framework for the management agenda for modernisation and change. Yet you can count on one hand the number of managers or politicians who are prepared to defend the outcome on the airways and elsewhere. That difficult job has largely been left to us."
Mr McLoone said this reluctance was evidence that the management agenda for change had failed to relate to clients, customers and citizens.
He said he did not believe there was any stomach for a return to the system in place prior to benchmarking for determining public sector pay. This generally involved a series of leap-frogging claims by unions.
However, Mr McLoone said he did not believe there was public support either for "the unfettered, devil-take-the-hindmost, free market advocated by our shrillest critics".
"First, we have to put ourselves in the customers' or clients' shoes. Rather than developing elaborate new management systems and practices that reflect textbook theories, we need to come up with simple, understandable reforms that meet public demands."
He suggested that such reforms must include making it simpler and easier to access public services, making it quicker to obtain entitlements, and easier to understand and appeal if told there was no entitlement. "The choice for us as public service unions is to either let those who care more for private profit set the agenda or boldly set it ourselves. The strongest allies of public service workers should be the people we serve."