Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the deletion of the measure. At the time it was regarded correctly as a very negative development, not just in terms of the pay and conditions of public service workers but also a real intrusion on the voluntarist system of collective bargaining which had traditionally operated in this jurisdiction. It gave the Minister unilateral powers, which he said he did not use. Of course, he did not have to use them because it was the stick, rather than the carrot, that he used in his dealings with the public sector trade unions. It is very important that the Government now accept that that type of measure, be it an emergency measure or otherwise, was wrong and that it commit to using the traditional form of negotiation and bargaining with the unions.

On the issue of pay recovery, the subject of the second part of my question and the one most immediately in people’s minds, is the Minister saying that, notwithstanding the hoopla about the repeal, public service workers will not see any improvement in their pay packets between now and 2016?

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