The participation of the social partners in key national debates is "rather limited", the European Regional Industrial Relations Congress was told yesterday in Dublin. A paper from Ms Emer O'Hagan, Queens University, said the social partners were "hand-tied" in tripartite national wage agreements in the Republic, by the macro-economic policies which the Government had adopted.

Ms O'Hagan referred in particular to the Government's desire to join EMU as a founding member in 1999. Ms O'Hagan cited academic research showing that the tight economic environment in which the national programmes have been agreed "ensures their success as the social partners see little leeway for alternative solutions and wage drift". She said the Government is bent on being a founder member of EMU in 1999. Commentators believed this decision was taken without any negotiation with the social partners, she said.

Mr Stephen McCarthy, industrial officer with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, told the conference that "the development of social partnership at a national level since 1987 has been a major support to the competitive performance of Ireland".

He said the country had been far less effective at replicating this success at enterprise and company level. "While the mobile capital companies, in particular the US-based ones, have taken the initiative, even they have been timid in responding to offers of social partnership with their workforce."

In a paper reviewing the operation of the Industrial Relations Act 1990, its authors, Mr Joe Wallace and Mr Bernard Delany of the University of Limerick, said a survey they conducted showed that four-fifths of trade union officials believed the 1990 Act had increased the number of times employers resort to the law.

Some 44 per cent of union officials who took part in the survey said they experienced employers threatening to seek an injunction. According to the survey, 73 per cent said the 1990 Act was "a mistake which should not have been accepted in its current form and which needs major amendment or repeal".

In his address to the conference, the Minister for Labour, Trade and Consumer Affairs, Mr Kitt, said he believed the time had come to promote and encourage deeper partnership between management and employees in individual companies.