Having assisted at the birth of "social partnership" in 1987, Irish Business & Employers' Confederation (IBEC) director general, Mr John Dunne, was called in this week to see if its latest incarnation, Partnership 2000, could be saved. His initial prognosis is that its prospects are "very poor" and that the chances of the social partners producing a successor are even worse.
Mr Dunne has an almost proprietorial concern about the latest generation of national agreements. He is, along with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions general secretary, Mr Peter Cassells, the only senior figure amongst the social partners to have been involved in negotiation of all four agreements since 1987. His constituency - Irish business - can feel more than satisfied with the results.
Twelve years of social partnership have delivered unprecedented economic growth and equally unmatched wage moderation. Tax cuts by the Exchequer and employment initiatives were the successful trade-off with the unions.
That formula still appears to be working in the private sector. While there are growing concerns about wage drift, the latest Central Statistics Office figures show that industrial earnings in the year ending last March increased 5.5 per cent. Industrial production increased by 13.7 per cent.
What is causing Mr Dunne and the business lobby concern are developments relating to public service pay. The Government finally issued a statement last week that it would not concede pay demands from nurses, gardai and CIE employees. Earlier the same day, in a news bulletin to its 7,500 members, IBEC called on the Government to "shout stop" at the spiralling pay demands of groups such as the nurses. These would fuel already rising expectations in the private sector and undermine competitiveness, it said.
Mr Dunne fears that the avalanche of public-service pay demands may spell the end of social partnership. "We in IBEC regret that, because it seems to us that the way in which we have managed social partnership and developed it since 1988, in combination with the pay agreements, has been a winning formula for Ireland. The thought that we might willingly throw out a formula that is the envy of nearly every country in the world is beyond belief." He does not claim that IBEC came to social partnership brimming with altruism, but he says the commitment is nonetheless real for that. Last July, when he became the first business leader to address an ICTU conference, he admitted to delegates that he had come to social partnership through thinking "commercially rather than socially".
He said it "made no sense" to business people to have "an underclass in society with little opportunity to escape, or not seek long-term solutions to poverty and crime. It makes no sense that young people on good incomes cannot buy a house and that the lack of adequate child-care facilities keeps many well-skilled and expensively trained women out of the workforce.
"It makes no sense that we siphon taxpayers' money away into short-term palliatives rather than long-term solutions". Then came the punch-line. He told trade unionists that it made no sense either "for those whose first instinct on entering social partnership was to think socially, to see Irish jobs threatened by paying ourselves more than the international market can afford".
Mr Dunne's ability to communicate may come in part from his work in marketing in Britain, before returning to Ireland to join the Federated Union of Employers (FUE) in 1966. By 1988 he was director general of the Federation of Irish Employers (FIE) - as the FUE was then called - and, when the FIE amalgamated with the Confederation of Irish Industry (CII) in 1993, he went on to become director general of the new Irish Business and Employers' Confederation. It now has a turnover of £12 million (€15.2 million), employs 155 people and has branch offices throughout the Republic, as well as the Irish Business Bureau office in Brussels, which provides a powerful lobby at EU level.
He is an intensely "political animal" and indeed, compares his own job with that of trying to run a catch-all political party. "We have everyone from undertakers to the biggest companies in the country, and that is the challenge, and the fun, getting people to adopt common positions on the important issues."
But more mundanely he adds that, "We're like any other business. We're only as good as our achievements and, if we don't achieve, we don't get paid".
At the same time he strongly believes that the success of IBEC and the political clout it has developed, is based on its ability to address wider issues than the old FIE or CII ever did. "We are very responsible citizens," he says. "We believe that what's good for business is good for the economy and country generally. "You have to show a commitment to the social agenda. You have to do that by developing in a holistic way, with a vision of Ireland as a whole. With greater wealth there can be greater inclusiveness for everyone."
The recent IBEC regional plan for Dublin is a good example of this approach, with its emphasis on "soft" issues such as upskilling and educating the long-term unemployed, and improving public transport, as well as traditional business concerns.
Apart from the split in the Small Firms' Association, which led to the creation of the troubled Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association, IBEC has managed so far to present an united front on the key issues. That includes public sector employers as well as the private sector. In fact IBEC's only recent embarrassment is the way some employers in both sectors have ignored its injunction of no special pay deals for millennium working.
However, Mr Dunne sees this as an isolated issue. He is far more concerned at what he describes as the "negativity" fuelling antagonism towards national agreements. "I think they relate firstly to developments in the public sector, where there's been an increasingly worrying trend since the local bargaining provisions of the Programme for Competitiveness and Work were put in place.
"That trend has seen, in our judgment, real abuse of the system of relationships which dominate collective bargaining in the public sector. The result has been a whole series of settlements for various groups of public sector workers, way ahead of the provisions of agreements, so that pay in the public sector is running significantly faster than the private sector.
"The second reason we're becoming negative is that there doesn't seem to be any coherent view on the trade union side of what to do, or willingness to stand up for the integrity of the agreements."
Some trade union leaders, particularly in the private sector, seemed to be running with the formula of a new central agreement, with local bargaining as an extra. "We have no interest whatsoever in that and quite bluntly we would not be prepared to play on that pitch at all," he says.
"We think that, of the options that are around, a realistic pay agreement within social partnership is the best formula, supported by tax reductions. Enterprise level bargaining is the other option, in which undoubtedly some will do better than others, but equally undoubtedly some businesses and some employers will get hurt."
He does not rule out the possibility of separate public and private sector pay deals. But he does point out that this could create problems in areas such as taxation, which had been an important element of previous agreements. He also believes increases must relate to those of our main trading partners, where pay rises of between 2 and 3 per cent are anticipated in the next 12 months.
He says social partnership has made a dramatic impact on "three evils of Irish society" - unemployment, emigration and social exclusion. "Are we now saying as a society that what we want to do is use the wealth we have worked so long and so hard to create for incomes? It's all very depressing and if we do that we will find out in jig time the motor we have created has been killed, and that motor is competitiveness."
He adds: "It's so crazy. Kids growing up now have expectations enormously better than we ever had, because of social partnership, and we want to get rid of it."
