After months of shadow boxing, the Government and public-service unions and representative bodies will begin talks next week on a revised pay agreement for about 300,000 State employees.
But as the Cabinet was considering proposals for the talks, tabled by the Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe on Tuesday, doctors, nurses and midwives were setting out their stall for special financial incentives to tackle recruitment and retention problems in the health sector.
The demands by 50,000 staff for their own special pay deal underline the difficulties that will have to be overcome if an overall agreement is to be secured.
Even before the negotiations get under way next week, there has been pushback from other unions against the concept of any special deals.
One senior public-service union figure told the media last week that nurses were unlikely to secure a special deal in the forthcoming process.
Process
That person said the only likely outcome from the talks was that unions would seek to get the other side to agree to a process where claims of retention problems “can be examined and tested as opposed to and X plus Y” – where one group would receive additional money on top of the amount awarded to others.
Separately, Peter Nolan, national secretary of the country's largest public service union, Impact, last week warned that the Government could trigger a spate of "uncontrolled leapfrogging" pay claims among State employees if it agreed to special deals for particular groups. He said it would be "unacceptable" for any group to get higher pay awards than others.
Nurses were furious at what they saw as a suggestion by the senior union figure to the media that their pay claim was unlikely to succeed and that it would just be shunted into a process.
Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation general secretary Liam Doran signalled that while there could be a process to look at resolving recruitment issues, this could not meander on indefinitely and would have to deliver within a reasonable period of time.
Uncompetitive
However, the emergence of special rises for nurses could unsettle other unions across the public service. Doctors argue that their pay has become uncompetitive and that this will have to be addressed if the medical brain drain is to be stemmed. About 300 hospital consultant positions are currently vacant.
An assertion by Irish Medical Organisation president Anne Hogan that emergency-medicine consultants were being offered AU$400,000 (€268,000) to work in Queensland starkly set out the dilemma for the Government.
The health unions contend that Ireland is competing in an English-speaking international market to retain its medical and nursing staff and pay structures need to reflect this reality.
However, the aim of the Government and many other unions is to reach a revised collective agreement in the forthcoming talks.
Fragmentation of the public-service union movement is not a new phenomenon. Divisions between unions representing front-line staff who work across the full day and those whose members work largely office hours has been a feature in previous negotiations.
The objective of the Government going into the new process is to secure economic certainty over its wage bill as well as industrial relations stability.
To achieve this aim it will have to bring, ideally, all unions but certainly the vast majority on board any revised deal to succeed the Lansdowne Road accord.
Otherwise the potential is there for further industrial unrest in the autumn.