TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen warned that the Croke Park agreement on the public service would have to be implemented to avoid further pay cuts and job losses.

He said the agreement provided a means by which the public service could be transformed through greater flexibility, redeployment, changed work practices and reductions in numbers.

“We will require good leadership from management as well as staff if the commitment to avoid further pay reductions and compulsory redundancies is to be honoured,” he added.

The Government had no wish to back away from the commitment into which it entered at Croke Park, but it could do this only on the basis of full and comprehensive delivery by all of the parties.

“The Government considers that any party that chooses to remain outside the provisions of the agreement cannot expect to benefit from the commitments it gave as part of the agreement,” he added.

“That is our clear position.”

He said the agreement provided the industrial relations environment for the successful implementation of public service transformation.

Mr Cowen said there had already been a reduction of 12,000 in public service numbers since the end of 2008, with no reduction in services.

Recently, he added, a voluntary early retirement and redundancy scheme had been approved for certain categories of staff in the public health area.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny asked how Mr Cowen could assert that there was no reduction in services in the health area, given that 600 psychiatric nurses had not been replaced.

Mr Cowen said the premise of Mr Kenny’s argument suggested no change could be beneficial to the delivery of services and that fewer people working in an area could not, by definition, provide a better service.

“I do not subscribe to that,” he said. “We have seen changes in a whole range of areas.”