MINISTER FOR Finance Brian Lenihan has told public service trade unions that the Government remains committed to the Croke Park agreement.
Mr Lenihan gave the assurance to the chairman of the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and general secretary of Impact, Shay Cody, at a meeting on Monday.
Highly placed sources said the Minister stressed that the Department of Finance had not been involved in speculation in the media over the weekend that the deal was under threat.
It is understood that the Minister also sympathised with the view of the trade unions that some on the management side in the public service could do more on the implementation of the agreement. The Irish Times reported last week that a number of Government departments and agencies had missed the deadline for submitting action plans for the implementation of the deal.
The employers’ group Ibec has also expressed disappointment at the level of progress made on rolling out the Croke Park agreement, while arguing for the retention of pay cuts. Publishing its pre-budget submission yesterday, Ibec said the Government should not use savings generated under the Croke Park agreement to reimburse staff in the public service for pay cuts experienced over the last year.
Instead, it has argued that any money saved should go to the exchequer to meet the needs of wider society.
Ibec’s director general, Danny McCoy, said “the game had changed” and that the country was now facing a much harsher environment. The Croke Park agreement allows for savings made under the reform programme to be used to reimburse staff in the public service for pay cuts introduced over the last year or so. However, the detail of how this would work has not been made clear.
Mr McCoy expressed disappointment at the level of progress on rolling out the Croke Park agreement. He said the agreement needed to deliver what it said it was going to deliver, but that the benefits of the deal “may be needed for wider society rather than for those in secure employment”.
“Everything has to be back on the table for this adjustment. The Croke Park deal was put in place to provide breathing space to provide a chance to identify true adjustment in the public sector. The scale of the public sector is far too big for the scale of the economy.
“Our economy, when the recession has ended, will have given up one-fifth of its output. The resources being taken by the public sector in this newer smaller-scale economy are disproportionate. The Croke Park deal was to identify how to make the adjustment back to a more sustainable and effective public service.”
However, Mr McCoy said that the evidence was not yet available to judge whether it had been successful. “But the time is critically running out. We need to see what savings are going to be delivered. And I believe that the game has changed and those savings need to go back to the bottom line of this society and not into the pockets of public sector workers,” he added.
Last week, Minister of State for Science Conor Lenihan suggested in a newspaper column that if progress was not made soon, it would probably signal the end of the Croke Park deal.