Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Social partnership and the kind of structured agreements that we have had have by and large been good for this country over many years. They were abused and misused in the latter days of the Celtic tiger madness but as a principal way of doing business in a mixed economy like ours, it is a better way to go than the adversarial way which characterised industrial relations in the past.

There is much productivity that can be got out of the system. There is potential, particularly in the third level sector, to achieve enormous synergies, some of which we cannot even fully measure at present because we do not have direct access to some of the information.

I would like to see a successor agreement to the current Croke Park one. I have said that before; I am saying it again. As I stated earlier in answer to a question put by Deputy Catherine Murphy, issues have arisen because we were not able to cut the existing pay without breaking people's terms and conditions, and the spirit of the Croke Park agreement. All we could do was to lower the entry grade for newcomers to the system, as has happened right across the private sector as well.

Frankly, I would be surprised, in the context of discussions on a new agreement, if these issues were not put on the table by the parties to the agreement. I am not going to prejudge what those parties might want to say, how they might say it or where we will finish up at the end of the day. Certainly, it is in that context that I see the issue being addressed. Whether it will be addressed upwards or downwards is a matter for discussion in the negotiations, on the outcome of which I will not comment.

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