THE general secretary of the IPSU, Mr John O'Dowd, has urged his 10,000 members in the Civil Service to accept the latest pay offer from the Government.
The offer is worth between 3.5 her cent and 24 per cent and an estimated 3,300 members will be promoted over the next three to four years.
All CPSU members in the Civil Service clerical grades will also have the opportunity to reach the top of a new 15 year scale bringing the ceiling on earnings from £230 a week to £308 for most.
Despite its unanimous recommendation by the CPSU executive, many delegates at the annual conference yesterday were unhappy with the offer. Three members of the executive dissociated themselves from it.
Mr Simon Rooney of the executive said that for 10 weeks they had the Government "running scared" as a result of their industrial action across the Civil Service on pay and the public service recruitment embargo.
While the pay elements were good, the changes being sought in working conditions represented "a bridge too far for me". He said that the Government had replaced the public sector embargo by a cap on numbers.
Clause five of the Programme for Competitiveness and Work precluded industrial action but the cap on numbers invoked by the Government was itself a form of industrial action. He urged rejection of the deal.
Another executive member, Mr Denis Keane, said that the offer did not solve the problem of low pay in the Civil Service, while Ms Naoimh Maguire said that she had changed her mind about the merits of the offer.
However Mr Peter Daly of the Land Registry branch said that the executive had either endorsed the deal, or they had not.
"If you weren't sure you should have said, `I'm abstaining and I'm going back to my branch ford direction'." He said he did not want to be represented by people who were "running with the hare and hunting with the hounds".
Earlier Mr O'Dowd said they were meeting "in quite special circumstances. The single biggest dispute in the history of the civil service has just come to an end.
"Some 10,000 members across all departments and offices took industrial action, for 10 full weeks in most cases. Members made considerable sacrifices through loss of earnings and gave their wholehearted support to the campaign for lifting the embargo on jobs and for a decent settlement on pay.
"We always said this would be a difficult dispute and it turned out to be a very hard fought battle. The whole weight of such a powerful forces as the farmers lobby and the conservative newspapers were thrown against us.
"The Irish Farmers Association went so far as to call for emergency legislation to stop the action in the Department of Agriculture."
Anticipating criticism from delegates, Mr O'Dowd said, "It is easy to claim increases of any size like the hard part is justifying these claims." The reality was that claims had to relate to comparable jobs outside or inside the Civil Service, or be based on some concept of productivity.
However several delegates took him and the executive to task. Among them was Ms Angela Cassidy of the Customs and Excise branch in Rosslare, who topped the poll to become the new president of the CPSU.
However, delegates did not recommend rejection of the pay deal, which now goes to ballot.