Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

Even if that were not the case, the fundamental question is whether Governments should keep their commitments. I am a little shocked that the Fine Gael Party is proposing not to pay the benchmarking award. It betrays an ongoing ambivalence towards social partnership with which the party was not happy in the past. The biggest mistake the Fine Gael and Labour parties made in the mid-1980s was to oppose the introduction of social partnership arrangements.