The employers' organisation IBEC criticised trade unions yesterday for ignoring certain provisions of Partnership 2000 and warned that any new national pay agreement must be adhered to by all the parties.

Speaking at an Employee Relations Conference titled Staying Ahead - The Challenge for Irish Employers, IBEC president, Mr Richard Burrows, said there were a number of high-profile cases where trade unions had ignored the peace clause in Partnership 2000.

The criticism, coming only two days after the start of negotiations on a new national pay agreement, was a case of IBEC "putting down a marker for the future", said Mr Burrows.

Any new agreement must be "adhered to by all parties" and could not include the kind of double digit percentage pay increases that some unions were considering.

Mr Burrows said the Republic would lose competitiveness if the final pay agreement surpassed the average pay increase figure expected in the euro zone. He said this looked like being around 2.5 per cent.

"The analysis is simple, we don't think this type of economic growth can continue ad infinitum," he said.

Deputy general secretary of IMPACT, Mr Shay Cody, dismissed IBEC's assessment as "a wrong description of the situation" and said there had been no difficulties with Partnership 2000.

However, he said there needed to be a system in place for any future agreement which allowed for the process of change in industrial relations.

On the question of pay, Mr Cody said employers did not even believe a figure of 2.5 per cent would suffice. Irish growth rates justified greater pay increases.

Several speakers at the conference outlined different visions of partnership.

Rabbi Julia Neuberger, chief executive of the King's Fund and chancellor of the University of Ulster, addressed the low participation of women at senior level in Irish business.

She criticised what she termed "`the cookie cutter model of recruitment" prevalent in the Republic, where male employers recruit members to boards in their own image. She said the best way to bring more women to prominence in the business world was through offering "childcare, childcare, childcare, a bit of granny care and a lot more female role models".

General secretary of the British Trade Union Congress, Mr John Monks, said while social partnership remained a weak plant in Britain there was a realisation that the adversarial model of the early 1990s did not work.