Ms Patricia King:

With respect, if an employer were to say he or she intended to take X euro from one's pay packet every week, one would find very few people who would say "That is grand; you can do that." That is highly unlikely to happen for people who come under the heading of allowances to be prioritised for early elimination. It is probably untenable to run a public sector pay structure to which 1,100 allowances are attached. That is an issue that should be dealt with as soon as possible. Our argument is that there should be high quality engagement on consolidated pay rates sooner rather than later.

People are focusing now on the issue of employers deciding to home in on the lower paid, but our union has experience of this issue and has been actively engaged in batting on it for the past two and a half years. In some cases there have been very tricky engagements, particularly in the local authority area where county managers decided they would make their savings based on how much they could pull out of a county council worker's pocket.