The 26-member central executive committee of the Garda Representative Association meets this morning and is expected to accept a Government pay offer which could give long-serving officers a pay increase of more than 13 per cent.

For many gardai, the offer will be close enough to the GRA's original 15 per cent demand to allow it to call off further industrial action and the threat to disrupt the Tour de France next month.

The offer is under the Programme for Competitiveness in Work pay round which should have closed at the end of 1996 but which was re opened especially for the gardai because it was accepted they had not made a sufficiently good case when they first negotiated under the programme.

The problem for Government in reopening the PCW was that if the gardai were seen to overtake deals struck by other public sector unions, the floodgates would open with every other union seeking new deals.

The Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Justice repeatedly warned that there would be no special deal for the gardai over and above that given to other unions.

The GRA demanded a 15 per cent further increase under the PCW and went on the war path in pursuit of its demand. The State experienced its first mass demonstration by gardai on April 21st when about 4,000 marched on the Dail and then when the vast majority of the 8,000 officers of garda rank called in on 24-hour sick leave on May 1st.

The GRA went for even higher stakes last week when another 24hour stoppage was called with barely a day's notice. The stoppage decision was taken at 2 a.m. on Friday by a small group of leading GRA figures.

Other members of the central executive committee were telephoned at home as late as 4 a.m. to be told of the stoppage from 6 a.m. on Saturday to 6 a.m. on Sunday.

The stoppage call received even greater support than the May 1st "blue flu" day and left a great deal of the State without Garda cover. Luckily, there were no serious incidents, but senior officers conceded that it would have been very difficult to cope with almost any serious incident in areas where stations, which would normally have night cover of up to 15 officers, had to get by with only two or three.

The escalation led to the intervention of the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and a deal. It is understood the rudiments were worked out over the weekend and virtually finalised during yesterday's talks between the GRA and Department of Justice officials.

The deal is said to be very similar to one with the prison officers under the PCW. That involved pay increases of 13.5 per cent, but only at the top end of the scale.

The Prison Officers' Association deal was regarded as one of the best negotiated by the public sector from the point of view of long-serving officers. About a third of the POA deal is made up of long-service top-up payments, another third is tied into new productivity and another third a no-strings-attached rise.

AS A result, the prison officers' pay rose significantly above that of gardai. The special payment to the nurses - who are still paid much less than police - compounded the growing Garda anger and led to the industrial action.

It was not completely clear last night whether the GRA deal breaches the Government guidelines on public pay. Government sources insisted the guidelines were intact and that similar deals had been negotiated by other unions.

Until the full detail of the deal is known, it will not be possible to know whether there has been a breach on the Government's part. However, the indications were last night that there should be sufficient fudge of the "productivity" issue to allow the GRA to claim it had won on this issue.

The GRA said it would not negotiate any further productivity deals until it had received adequate compensation for past productivity.

In fact, there certainly is room for considerable manoeuvre on this issue as the Garda has introduced some new technology, dozens of new laws and some work changes in recent years which have not been accompanied by pay increases.

It is possible that payment for these changes could be included in the deal and rationalised differently by both sides.

The feeling among senior Garda and Government sources last night, based on initial information about the deal, was that the Taoiseach had pulled off a coup in settling the dispute without breaching the public pay guidelines. The truth of this remains to be seen.

The only likely problem may arise if the mainly younger, urban gardai balk at a deal from which they get relatively little. They have had to contend with most of the "productivity" changes, yet their older, mainly rural colleagues will probably gain the most.

Similar annoyance broke out among the mainly younger prison officers when the POA accepted their deal. The younger prison officers threatened a breakaway but this has not materialised.

Gardai have a history of splitting, and the GRA only reconstituted itself at the start of this year after three years in which Dublin gardai walked out of the association in a dispute over the previous pay deal which had left them short.