THE LATEST REVIEW of the Croke Park Agreement by the body tasked with overseeing its implementation received a mixed reaction today with calls for more savings from the agreement between the government and the public sector unions.
The second annual report of the agreement showed that there had been total savings of around €920 million for the taxpayer in the agreement’s second year with a total saving of €1.5 billion made since the agreement came into effect in 2010.
The findings were welcomed by Public Expecnditure and Reform Minister Brendan Howling who said they showed how the public sector was doing “more with less”.
But Fianna Fáil’s Seán Fleming claimed there were some gaps in the report with no details on “severance payments” for public sector workers.
The business representative group, Chambers Ireland, said that the agreement between the government and the so-called social partners needed to generate more savings through cuts to pay and pensions.
“Given our huge deficit which sees us borrowing over €1bn a month to fund the State and its public service pay and pension bill, more needs to be done to deliver savings urgently which will close this gap,” Seán Murphy, deputy CEO of Chambers Ireland, said today.
“A pause on increments and cuts to allowances must be on the agenda if we are to improve our public finances.
“The chair of the Implementation Body has noted elsewhere that 63 per cent of civil service workers are eligible to receive incremental pay rises, including some 2,776 earning more than €70,000.”
Murphy went on to say public sector unions must not be allowed to block any reforms to increments and allowances.
Unsurprisingly, the unions were not in agreement with one of them, SIPTU, saying that savings had been made at a cost to low-paid workers in the public sector.
The union’s vice president, Patricia King, said: “The review also confirms that those workers at the lowest pay levels across the public service have contributed substantially to the reforms in work practices to date through roster changes, redeployment, the extended working day and loss of allowances.
“They have also suffered from the loss of regular, rostered over-time which, in the majority of cases, is calculable for pension purposes.
“The big challenge for the next two years of the Agreement is the accelerated implementation of critical reform and change and to ensure that the burden of such transformation is shared across all levels of the public service,” she added.
As a result of the agreement, staffing numbers in the public service have fallen by 17,300 over the past two years with an anticipated drop of a further 11,500 more workers in the public sector by 2015, the year after the agreement comes to an end.
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