The general secretary of the ESB Officers' Association, Mr Willie Cremins, has called on the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to convene a special delegate conference "to review the continued operation" of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness.
Mr Cremins's comments yesterday reflect widespread disappointment within the trade union movement at the failure of the social partners to agree specific measures to curb inflation when they met in a plenary session of the PPF on Wednesday.
Mr Cremins, whose union has made a general pay claim for 16.5 per cent at the ESB, described the plenary discussions as little more than "a talking shop. The unions had talked about taking concrete measures and came out without anything substantive, which makes a nonsense of the whole process."