The general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has defended the chairman of the Public Service Pay Commission’s impartiality following comments he made about the planned Garda strikes.
Liam Doran said that Mr Duffy’s comments at an industrial relations conference earlier this week did not compromise him in his role as chair of the commission.
Mr Duffy, who is also the former head of the Labour Court, said the planned strikes by members of the Garda Representative Association (GRA) and the AGSI were “illegal by any standard” and that threatening strike action amounted to “mutiny”.
“I honestly don’t think the comments compromise his role as chair of the Public Service Pay Commission. My union has been in front of Mr Duffy in his capacity of chair of the Labour Court on a number of occasions. On a human level, I’d be the first to say he’s broken our heart in terms of not giving us the recommendations we wanted,” said Mr Doran.
“But I don’t think there is any body else in this country that has the breadth, the depth, the experience, the expertise, the knowledge, the sixth sense, that you are required to have as chairman of any industrial relations body — be it the Labour Court or the PSPC, Kevin Duffy has a wealth of experience,” he told RTÉ’s Today with Sean O’Rourke show.
“If you sat in front of Kevin Duffy as I have, a sharper brain you couldn’t get, if you don’t have your arguments A to Z in order you ain’t going to get by by bluffing,” he said.
“Sharp brain, sharp intellect, shrewd, weighs up all sides — you win some you lose some, that’s the nature of industrial relations, but in terms of competence and experience and expertise Kevin Duffy is as good as you’ll get.”
Mr Doran said when he first heard the comments, he thought that yes eyebrows might be raised, “but then when you delved deeper – I understood that the comments were in the context of a debate on extending the ban on the right to certain grades, groups and categories to the right to strike”.
‘Difficult situation’
He said: “The descriptive comments about the gardai, were descriptive only — explaining his understanding of the current law. The narrow focus upon the word ‘mutiny’ doesn’t actually reflect what Mr Duffy was trying to say.
Mr Doran said he understood Garda bodies were in a “difficult situation”.
He said: “This was a discussion about the right to strike and a contention by another party that the ban needs to be extended and expanded, I would be absolutely opposed to that, I absolutely respect the right of all grades, groups and categories to strike. But the example was being made that the law should be expanded.
“What Mr Duffy was trying to do was to say — ‘sure if we have that law now and the guards in theory don’t have the right to strike, well, they did strike, they were organising a strike and the law could not be enforced’.
“So therefore you cannot enforce a ban on the right to strike when workers organise. Nor should you, workers should have the right to withdraw labour depending on what their employer is doing or not doing towards them.”