Future pay rises for public servants will be more strongly linked to unions agreeing to greater reforms, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has told an Oireachtas committee.
The Sustaining Progress social partnership established "a clear link between pay and the implementation of change", he told the finance and public service committee.
"The Government will be seeking to strengthen this linkage [in the negotiations under way on a successor deal] and to ensure that similar arrangements will apply in any successor agreement," he said. However, Mr Ahern warned that unions and other key groups have "cast-iron contracts" that cannot simply be broken.
"People do not just give away their contracts," he said.
Hospital consultants and other professionals are often more determined to protect their interests than unskilled workers.
"The more letters they have after their name, the less they give - even if they do not call themselves unions," he said, adding that such groups want to pass on the advantages they enjoy to the next generation.
Fine Gael TD Richard Bruton insisted that insufficient reforms had been conceded by the public service in return for the €1.3 billion paid to them under the first benchmarking special pay round.
Rejecting the Taoiseach's presentation, Labour TD Joan Burton said bad planning had left rapidly expanding areas, such as her Dublin West constituency, short of primary school places.
Just 11 out of 100 children in need of primary school places in Dublin West were awarded them on Tuesday when primary schools issued their second-round offers to parents.
"I have taken phone calls today from completely distraught parents who have no place to send their children," she said, blaming the Department of Education and Science for the situation.
