Union warns of action ahead of budget

THE COUNTRY’S largest trade union has said that there will definitely be some industrial and strike action in advance of the forthcoming budget.

A Siptu spokesman said last night that the nature and extent of such industrial and strike action – in protest at proposed cuts in public pay and services – would be decided at a later date.

The union spokesman said that a ballot of members for industrial and strike action would commence next week.

Siptu’s biennial delegate conference in Tralee yesterday heard proposals for a 24-hour national stoppage in protest at proposed cutbacks and threats to existing terms and conditions.

Kieran Allen of Siptu’s education branch said that public sector workers had voted in huge numbers to take strike action as part of a day of protest originally planned for last March and that it had been “a terrible mistake” for this to have been called off by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

“That action encouraged the Government to believe that trade unions were weak and to stick the boot in further,” he said.

Mr Allen also said that he did not want to be represented on television by people who had been at the head of Fás and who had discredited themselves and that he would far prefer to have people who did not have this baggage defending the public sector.

He also urged that the union should mobilise members to attend outside the Green Party’s special conference next Saturday, telling them a vote for Nama will mean cutbacks in the community and education sectors.

Mr Allen said that if the union went into the forthcoming day of protest action called for by the Irish Congress of Trade Union for November 6th with any hesitancy it was not going to do any good.

Paul Shields of the education branch said that the march in Dublin last February, which attracted a crowd of 120,000, was supposed to have been the first stage in a rolling campaign of progressive industrial action.

He said that the campaign was to have been progressed further in a one-day national strike on March 30th, but that at the 11th hour cold water had been poured on the plan.

Mr Shields said that his members had proposed a 24-hour national stoppage to be carried out through the public and private sector as a first step in a concerted campaign.

“We do not accept that a walk along the well-worn route from Parnell Square to an empty Dáil constitutes a day of action while Lenihan is laughing down his sleeve at us while implementing policies that are progressively more draconian.

Separately, Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole told the conference that over the last 10 years or so a gentry or aristocracy had been created in Irish society which was not accountable to the law or to taxation.

He said that it was crucial that the labour movement should stand up and say that the system that brought about the problems in the economy should not be reconstructed after a few years.