Shane Ross (Independent)

——every day are looking to their unions to see them negotiate their deals in Government Buildings. They do not give two hoots about this deal but these two imposters go to Government Buildings and negotiate much more than a pay deal.

Senator Cox eloquently broadened the agenda enormously to include housing, old age and education. These people are not only negotiating a pay deal, they are writing, without a mandate, the Government programme. They have an input into the budget which nobody in the House ever has and which Fianna Fáil backbenchers never have. They are usurping the democratically elected representatives because it is convenient for successive Governments to give them that type of power.

The third myth is that they have somehow brought industrial peace. Industrial peace has been reasonable in that period but there has not been industrial peace per se. We have had airports closed and threats of strikes from the post office union. Senator Ryan said the consequence will be industrial unrest if certain things happen. He is right. It does not stop people making threats of industrial unrest. If there is an economic downturn the clause on industrial peace will be thrown out the window as fast as any other clause. The reason we have had industrial peace has much more to do prosperity than social partnership.

This is a deal between the public sector and big business. They are hoodwinking other people into the belief that they are somehow represented in this deal. They are now. Within this public service deal there is the big fudge, the utter fiasco, which we were expected to believe on the last occasion was true, that is, that the public sector, for the benchmarking and the added value it gets out of this deal, is supposed to deliver some performance. All kinds of extraordinary committees, called performance verification groups, were set up which are an utter charade to verify that there had been public service performance to merit this. There has been virtually no improvement in public service performance. How can we say as Members of the Seand and the Dáil who got performance related bonuses pay that our performance has improved? Our performance has not improved, there is no measurement of it and there is nobody to measure it.