Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is not a case of this being left until the very last moment. Clearly, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has pointed out on many occasions the constraints that are upon Government in respect of the Lansdowne Road agreement. The Government yesterday was unanimous that we have to stand by the Lansdowne Road agreement and that this dispute must be settled within that, as must the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, ASTI, dispute. There can be no equivocation about that. Some 280,000 other public servants have signed up, and can see the benefits of so doing, to a path and a strategy towards an improvement in pay and conditions in the time ahead.

In respect of the Workplace Relations Commission and the Labour Court, it is important to point out that when that mechanism becomes the norm for gardaí - I want it to happen as quickly as possible with whatever legislative means are required, and Professor Horgan's work will feed into that - that will give gardaí the same arbitration mechanism as any and every other worker in the country, which is an important element of the claim made by gardaí for very many years, namely, that they were excluded from all of these areas.

In respect of the discussions the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has had, he made accessible whatever flexibility was available to him inside the Lansdowne Road agreement, including the pooling of the rent allowance into the basic income, the opportunity therefore to have a higher level of overtime paid, the €1,000 that is available to every other worker in the Lansdowne Road agreement and the recommendation from Mr. Olson of the Garda Inspectorate in regard to the parade allowance. These are generous improvements to the current situation and within the Lansdowne Road agreement for every garda.

The public service pay commission will feed into the overall situation.

The public pay commission, as I said to Deputy Martin and Deputy Adams, is entitled to commission work in respect of specific issues such as pay and conditions for gardaí or whatever else and it will generally feed into the preparation for the discussions that will follow the Lansdowne Road agreement. When the Minister for Finance sets out his ceilings for the 2018 budget, the earlier we bring forward a situation to have a successor agreement, the earlier every Department will pull from whatever that pot might be. The intention is to start the discussions and negotiations about a successor to the Lansdowne Road agreement whenever both the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform and the Minister for Finance are in a position to set out that ceiling. As we prepare for the 2018 budget, there will be the spring economic statement and the general economic conference.

We have set up the employer labour conference and I had a meeting with it a couple of weeks back. It was a very good meeting. The point it made was that it was not a negotiating forum but a very good opportunity to express the position in so far as workers and employers are concerned.

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