TÁNAISTE EAMON Gilmore has insisted the Government is not “seeking to unpick” the Croke Park agreement on public service pay and reform and says its terms can only be changed by negotiation.
Asked if increments would be paid to public sector workers, Mr Gilmore said yesterday they were part of the Croke Park agreement which would be honoured by the Government. He struck a different tone from that of Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte, who said at the weekend that the Government may have to renegotiate the agreement.
Mr Gilmore yesterday said the agreement was already delivering on public service reform and “major changes” would have to take place in future.
The Government wanted to ensure the required changes would happen in co-operation with public sector workers, he added.
“The Government is not seeking to unpick the Croke Park agreement. The Government is committed to working the Croke Park agreement and to honouring the terms of the Croke Park agreement . . . We will make it work,” he said.
“The Government is keen that that will be done in co-operation with the staff who work in the public service and that is why we’re honouring the Croke Park agreement and why we will make the Croke Park agreement work.”
On Sunday night, Mr Rabbitte said whether or not the agreement was renegotiated would depend on “growth rates, growth projections and . . . whether it delivers”.
Asked about this yesterday, Mr Gilmore said lower levels of growth would “of course change lots of parameters”, but he stressed that the Government “has no intention of resiling” from the agreement.
“The Croke Park agreement will be honoured by the Government and the only way that the Croke Park agreement can be changed is by negotiation.”
Mr Gilmore was speaking in Dublin at the launch of the We the Citizens final report.
Meanwhile, Minister of State for European Affairs Lucinda Creighton said the Government had proven its commitment to honour its programme for government arrangement on the agreement, “but things are changing all the time and I wouldn’t like to give any hostages to fortune”.
She said a difficult period lay ahead and everybody had to be flexible. “Pat Rabbitte said when the next round comes up for negotiation obviously we’ll be looking at it with a fresh eye and I think he’s absolutely right,” she said.
“It is essential to be flexible and to say we have to live in the real world and we have to acknowledge that we live in very, very difficult times and no one sector can be protected. That includes public servants, that includes people in the private sector like bankers and it includes politicians.”
Siptu president Jack O’Connor said he did not anticipate “any significant departure” from the present agreement. He pointed out that the public service now had fewer than 300,000 people and another 6,000 would be leaving this year.
“We are in extremely difficult times. There’s a lot of loose talk in the media in order to distract attention from the fact that wealthy people in this country really aren’t contributing anything additional as a result of Budget 2012 in a year when the multiple by which those in the top quartile of incomes exceed those at the bottom increased by another 25 per cent,” Mr O’Connor said.
“I’m not expecting any change in the Croke Park agreement as long as people in the public sector deliver change as they have done,” he told RTÉ Radio One.
Mr O’Connor said pay in the public service had “been cut by an average of 14.5 per cent” when asked if increments costing €250 million a year were sustainable.
