The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, has told the Irish Congress of Trade Unions that he is confident the social partners could conclude a new agreement to succeed Partnership 2000.
He also promised that the Government would take major initiatives to tackle the housing crisis and lack of childcare facilities before Partnership 2000 expired.
The Taoiseach said the legislation on a national minimum wage would be published before the end of September and passed through the Oireachtas before the end of the year.
Asked about delegates' calls for a minimum wage of £4.80p or £5 per hour, he said the Government was committed to introducing it at £4.40p, as recommended by the National Minimum Wage Commission. However, he added: "We are willing to listen to what people are saying".
Mr Ahern told delegates yesterday: "I have been, and will continue to be, a strong supporter of social partnership and the agreements and benefits we have negotiated and delivered on since 1987. Equally, I have to say that negotiating a successor to P2000 will not be easy. The very scale of the benefits which the agreements have delivered sets a very high standard."
Agreement was possible if people accepted "a number of key underlying principles", which had been "critical to the success we have achieved".
These were a "shared understanding" of social partnership", the importance of tackling poverty and inequality through social inclusion, and the importance of competitiveness.
Responding to calls at the conference for any new agreement to include much higher pay rises than in previous ones, Mr Ahern said that pay demands had to be balanced against the need for major social initiatives, such as providing better educational facilities for over a million primary and secondary school children.
Many workers had also benefited from various gain-sharing plans, which the Government had facilitated through its tax reforms, he added. The Taoiseach criticised companies that had been unimaginative in their approach to industrial relations and rewarding employees.
"Of course I can understand the frustration of workers who have received nothing more, over the past 12 years, than was provided for in the partnership agreements," he said. Some of these workers had seen their employers "move from Morris Minors to '99 Jags" in the meantime. "No doubt their case will be put strongly in the negotiations."
Mr Ahern was "convinced that partnership in the workplace will be, and must be, a much stronger feature for the future. I have no doubt that gain-sharing will be an important and growing dimension of incomes in the period ahead.
"I have no doubt either that this will be true of the public sector, as well as the private sector and, in that context, I welcome the progress being made in exploratory discussions with the public services committee of Congress on the future arrangements for public service pay."
The Taoiseach paid tribute to the role of the ICTU in developing partnership. While some commentators still sought "to portray unions as negative or anti-competitive bodies", these people "should ponder that, without the positive, disciplined and enlightened engagement of the ICTU and the trade union movement generally, there would have been no social partnership and the Irish people would have been denied the consequent transformation in our economic conditions."
He also questioned those in both the trade unions and business community who dismissed social partnership and said the economy would have boomed anyway. Mr Ahern said he could not recall "any of these people predicting a boom in the 1980s, early 1990s or even the mid-1990s."
The general secretary of ICTU, Mr Peter Cassells, said transport, housing, childcare and upskilling workers in vulnerable occupations would be priorities for the unions in any new agreement.
He said they would be looking to the Government to pursue the need for social and economic ground rules to make global competition fairer. If workers were being asked to give flexibility, they must be ensured some form of security in return.