Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Short of a breakthrough at the Labour Court today, we are all now expecting a full Garda strike on Friday. A total of 564 Garda stations throughout the country will lie empty. Serious questions about the safety of our communities deserve a more forthcoming response than we have yet received. Things look no better on the schools front with the possibility that 507 second level schools will lie empty from next week, potentially for an indefinite period.

It goes without saying that we in the Labour Party hopes a resolution will be found with gardaí today. We believe it did not need to be like this.

For weeks now Deputy Howlin has proposed a range of alternatives. The most significant of these is the establishment of a social dialogue that would involve public servants in discussions relating to public service provision as well as pay. That proposal is now receiving widespread support. As the architect of both the Haddington Road and the Lansdowne Road agreements, the Deputy has also argued that we need to begin negotiations formally for a successor deal to the Lansdowne Road agreement. That would accelerate pay restoration for all public servants. Finally, yesterday we at least received confirmation that this will happen during 2017.

We have also argued, and the Seanad has agreed to this, that an employer labour conference should be established. It is our view that the Government has waited too long to take any meaningful action. We keep hearing the mantra that the Lansdowne Road agreement is the only show in town. As I have made clear, we hope that a resolution will be found with gardaí today, but even if that is the case, at this stage it is abundantly clear that the Government's mantra is not good enough. We need mechanisms that will avoid such disputes from becoming increasingly common. We need to keep teachers in classrooms, nurses in hospitals and gardaí on the beat. The more than 300,000 public servants who work in various sectors need to be at work and not on strike.

During the worst period of our history we managed to preserve industrial peace. It is beyond belief how the Government has allowed this situation to regress so rapidly. This week the impact of industrial unrest seems likely to become very real.

My questions to the Taoiseach are as follows. Of the range of ideas proposed by the Labour Party to prevent growing industrial unrest, will he seriously consider any of them? Will he explain how the outworkings of the public service pay commission will feed into the potential successor to the Lansdowne Road agreement, if at all? Will he provide more detailed information on the contingency arrangements that are being put in place in the event of a strike on Friday?

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