The Ansbacher controversy threw what SIPTU vice president Mr Des Geraghty described as a "cloud" over the annual conference of the National Centre for Partnership in Dublin yesterday. He said the "captains of industry" needed "to purge the system openly" if they wanted to regain the trust of trade unionists.
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in addressing the conference was anxious to stress the positive achievements of social partnership, he also stressed the threat posed by the nurses' dispute to public service pay policy and Partnership 2000 in general. He maintained the Government's stance that it would not publish the Ansbacher list, although he accepted that this latest controversy would make it all the more difficult to secure a new agreement to succeed Partnership 2000.
As someone involved in negotiating three of the four national agreements, Mr Ahern said there had "always been problems".
Those surfacing at the moment belonged to the past. "I don't believe we should debate the future of this country on the basis of DIRT in the 1970s or Ansbacher in the 1980s." Mr Ahern reminded the social partners that tax cuts of £3 billion and a 35 per cent increase in real take-home pay had occurred since 1988. This contrasted with a 14 per cent reduction in take-home pay between 1980 and 1987.
The revelation that among those named in the Ansbacher report were many leading business people, including the former president of IBEC, Mr Tony Barry, failed to draw the confederation's director general, Mr John Dunne. He said IBEC only had corporate affiliates and he could not comment on the activities of individuals.
But he did accept that recent revelations were "not the best for discussing partnership issues."
He later told the conference that significant progress had been made in partnerships at local level. These had been driven initially from the centre and pay agreements "have been the oil in the gearbox of the national partnership process. They have - by taking the aggro out of pay bargaining at local level, by providing for long-term certainty and by first restoring and then enhancing the competitive position of Irish business - enabled the central process to address other broad economic and social issues".
In theory, social partnership at national and enterprise level could survive if there was a pay "free-for-all", but there was a serious danger that social partnership could face setbacks "in the heat of a return to enterprise level wage setting".
Mr Geraghty said the social partners were at "a crossroads in the Irish economy". There was "a possibility of going downhill, back to all the bad habits of the past, but there is also the possibility of building one of the most successful economies in the world".
