‘It comes at a cost’: How the Government bought industrial peace

Résumé détaillé

Disputes over a public sector pay deal and defence solicitors fees were resolved this week – is the Coalition left in a stronger or weaker position?

If Jack Chambers was wearing a cape, top hat and waving a magician’s wand he couldn’t have done a better job in making the potentially most fractious political issues of this Government’s term vanish into thin air.

Until last weekend, it seemed that the breakdown of a generation of industrial peace in the State would happen in the most public and mortifying way, with national industrial action happening on the biggest moment of Ireland’s six month presidency of the council of the European Union, with 50 world leaders arriving in Dublin.

But then over the weekend a “landing zone” was found between negotiators from the Department of Public Expenditure and from public sector trade unions. If paved the way for the final deal, worth €5 billion, that was hammered out in the early hours of Wednesday morning, giving a headline pay rise of 10.75 per cent between now and early 2029.

And abracadabra! A large political crisis became a total political non-issue. To employ Tommy Cooper’s catchphrase: “Just like that.”

The deal has attracted very little negative commentary from any political quarter.

The left are happy with it. The centrists are happy with it. The veering-rights are happy with it. And private sector and business interests are not jumping up and down about it either.

“I’m sanguine about the pay deal,” said Danny McCoy, chief executive of Ibec, Ireland’s largest business organisation.

“It’s not going to take the State down, or anything like that. It has a lot of resources. It wants to use those effectively. The deal should have been done three weeks ago, rather than having people on edge in the run up [to the European meetings]. Why bother go through that dance.

“There’s a realism here that we actually do have a functioning economy,” he said. “We have a functioning society. We have a functioning public sector. The reality is we have the resources.”

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