Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Chambers for her points. I make a broad point that this illustrates the contradiction and challenge I face as the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. Everywhere I go I face demands for more public expenditure and frequently, in the same analysis, people then go on to accuse me of breaching fiscal rules and expanding fiscal space. I must try to reconcile both together. On the response given to me by the Deputy, which she is entitled to do, it strikes me that if the Lansdowne Road agreement had disintegrated or if a number of my Government colleagues were facing pay claims that all had unpredictable consequences for this year, then I would be facing a very different issue if I was before the committee in the second half of this year. I will offer some perspective for those who have pointed to and criticised my response to the Labour Court recommendation on the An Garda Síochána issues. Those who criticise my response to it were also the people who were calling for An Garda Síochána to have access to the Labour Court. If I, as the Minister, had said the next day that I was not accepting that recommendation, then I would have fatally undermined the work of the Labour Court. For an employer to not accept the Labour Court's recommendation is one thing but it is another for the employer as Government - which set up the Labour Court - to not accept the recommendation. In so doing and definitively precipitating an environment in which the gardaí would have withdrawn their services, the next day would have posed a different set of consequences for which I am certain I would have been in front of this committee. Reference was made to how we are dealing with this issue. Critics are accusing me of responding to this but they would then criticise me if in the second half of the year I was facing pay claims that were unknowable. While there are risks with the approach I have taken, and I have acknowledged this, I believe in working with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and bringing clarity to a figure for this year. It offers me and the Government the best prospect of dealing with the maintenance of industrial relations in the State for this year. I ask Deputies to consider where we would be across the summer if we were facing a situation where momentum was building in the aftermath of Article 50 being triggered - we have a very difficult situation in Northern Ireland and a responsibility to play our role in helping to respond to that - and a situation in which public expenditure policy was unravelling because we were uncertain about what public pay would look like in the second half of 2017. I have had to make a set of choices to deal with that. This is the argument I make to Deputy Chambers about the proposal that was supported in Cabinet today.

As I do not want it to be uncertain to the committee, I will clarify one matter. I do not state that I have identified savings or efficiencies and am not giving the figures to the Deputies. That is not the case. I am simply saying that the cost of this proposal is a very large amount of money, as I have acknowledged on a number of occasions, but it is in the context of the public pay bill of €13.5 billion. Were I to have the unknown that I had in respect to An Garda Síochána across every aspect of that €13.5 billion, I would face a massive challenge for expenditure policy for the second half of this year. I have a process for how we are dealing with the issue and in how we can reconcile funding this expenditure while meeting other commitments. I am more than happy to come back to the committee during the year to account for this process.

I will end on that note. What would have posed a bigger risk in the context of delivering all the commitments the Deputy wants me to deliver are, in the context of a €13.5 billion pay bill for the State, sectoral wage claims that will escalate in the second half of this year. I do not wish that to happen, which is the reason I have been engaged in negotiations with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions since early December. We brought those negotiations to a conclusion very recently.