Mr. Eugene McGlone:

I thank the Chairman and Members of the Oireachtas. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions welcomes the opportunity to present its evidence to the committee. We believe we have a major role to play to underpin the peace process in Northern Ireland and, indeed, on the whole island of Ireland. I am the current president of ICTU and am accompanied by Ms Patricia McKeown, past president and member of the executive council and a member and former chair of the Northern Ireland committee of ICTU, and Mr. Jack O'Connor, the immediate past president of ICTU. His day job is at SIPTU and he is a member of ICTU's executive council and its general purposes committee. Ms McKeown and I have chaired ICTU's Northern Ireland committee and continue to serve on it. We are joined and supported today by colleagues from ICTU's secretariat, Ms Clare Moore and Mr. Peter Rigney, and by the current chair of the Northern Ireland committee, Ms Pamela Dooley, who was originally going to make a presentation but offered her speaking time to Mr. O'Connor to ensure the committee gets a flavour of the all-island nature of ICTU and sees that our concerns are not merely Northern ones. I will share the time with Ms McKeown and Mr. O'Connor.

Congress is the single trade union centre on the island of Ireland. Given that there are two distinct jurisdictions on the island, it is unique among European trade unions in that regard. Having a single, cohesive trade union centre and voice for workers in Ireland, particularly over the last 50 years, adds weight to any argument we make on social and economic matters.

We are also the largest civic society organisation in Ireland with the apex body representing some 800,000 workers. Our mission statement requires us to strive to achieve economic development, social cohesion and justice by upholding the values of solidarity, fairness, equality and human rights. The Northern committee of congress is a representative body of over 230,000 workers in Northern Ireland. In membership terms it is also the largest single civic society organisation in Northern Ireland and the most diverse, covering as we do the full spectrum of political opinion.

The trade union movement first committed itself to a bill of rights for Northern Ireland more than 50 years ago initially through a body known as the National Council for Civil Liberties. Throughout the decades of the conflict we continually strove to challenge discrimination in the workplace and in society and to campaign for peace. This is evidenced, for example, by our work on the declaration of intent which congress entered into with all employers to challenge discrimination in the workplace. It is further evidenced by the large numbers of people who over the past 40 years in particular came onto the streets to demonstrate for peace in response to trade union calls. Some members of this committee joined our demonstrations and I thank them for that. I include in that the march back to work which followed the Loyalist UWC strike in the early 1970s.

Regrettably since the peace agreement we have again had to make that call for people to demonstrate for peace on several occasions over the past few years. I pay particular tribute to the work of one of our former presidents, Inez McCormack, who died recently. Her efforts particularly on equality and human rights are reflected in many of the clauses in the Good Friday Agreement. Inez and her union, Unison, and my union put up large banners on our buildings calling on workers to vote for the Good Friday Agreement. This was achieved due mainly to the work of Inez and others in securing commitments which were vital to enabling the trade union movement advocate full and unequivocal support for the Good Friday Agreement in the 1998 referendum. It is of central concern to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions that the clear commitment to produce a bill of rights for Northern Ireland and the consequent charter of rights for the whole of the island is now 15 years overdue. I must emphasise that these rights include the whole social chapter encompassing workers' rights, particularly the right to collective bargaining and to have trade unions recognised for bargaining purposes to protect workers at their place of work. I thank the committee for listening to me and I now hand over to my colleague, Patricia McKeown.