Mr. John Clinton:

From our perspective, and the Secretary General referred to it earlier, one of the positive things about having gone through such tortuous negotiations in 2005 was that we were very clued into doing these type of agreements when the Croke Park agreement came along.

To answer Deputy O'Donnell's question on the operational allowance in the Irish Prison Service, for example, we were precluded from looking for a pay claim at that time because there was a national wage agreement, which would have been sustaining progress under the central agreements. The central agreement was agreed between the public services committee, in the public service context, of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the Department of Finance and nobody was allowed to get a pay claim outside of that. When we went into the negotiations in relation to bringing in the annualised hours package, we were restricted in the methodology in how we could do it and, therefore, we were only able to seek at the arbitration board an allowance in the nature of pay rather than a pay increase.