Around 2,000 retained firefighters around the country are set to stage a second day of industrial action on Tuesday, with many stations outside of the larger urban centres expected to close.
Emergency cover will be provided and members of the public are being advised to phone 999 or 112 as normal should they need to.
It is the second 24 hour action by members of Siptu in a dispute over the structure of pay and rostering arrangements in a service that, while part-time, places onerous demands on people wishing to help provide a vital service to their communities, the union claims.
As things stand, the firefighters are due to escalate their action to an all-out strike next week although, again, emergency cover would be maintained.
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Siptu says, however, it has been told that Minister for Local Government Darragh O’Brien will make “a positive statement” on the situation in the Dáil on Tuesday and that the union will evaluate this.
Colin McGowan, a retained firefighter/acting driver based in the Sligo town station, where he is also a Siptu representative, said the system was “designed in the 1940s and 50s” and the action was “about giving the country a better service as well as allowing us to get on with our lives”.
Firefighters at his station have it better than most in that they are rostered week on week off, he acknowledges, while many others, including those based at the counties other three stations, are expected to be available 24/7, 48 weeks of the year.
When he and his colleagues are rostered to be on, however, they are expected to be within 1.2 kilometres of the station and respond to an emergency call within five minutes.
“I don’t think people realise how we operate, the sort of bubble we live in,” he says. “I mean, if you go back to the first part of Covid and you were stuck in your two kilometres, we don’t even have two kilometres. You walk the same parks. We go to the same coffee shops. It’s a small little world you have to live in, very restrictive because of a job.”
The commitment required, he says, extends to partners, who must factor in the unpredictability of the situation when working out child-minding and other routine domestic arrangements.
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For this, members of the service receive a basic retainer of between around €8,000 and €12,000 plus another €2,000 or so for a mandatory 100 hours of training annually. Beyond that, remuneration is based on call-outs with a firefighter getting €42.38 for the first hour then €21.19 for subsequent hours on weekdays and twice those rates at night or weekends.
A recent report on the service, commissioned by Mr O’Brien, found the total annual pay received to typically range between €18,000 and €45,000. A decline over the long-term in the number of call outs has resulted in a fall in pay and in 2013, an exemption to normal social welfare requirements was made to allow some firefighters qualify for jobseekers’ allowance. At the time, it was estimated 800 were affected.
“We’re proving a vital service. We don’t want to be claiming welfare,” says McGowan but the restrictions involved mean other employers are increasingly reluctant to hire firefighters and only around a third of the firefighters he works with have other part or full time jobs, he says.
“Our full complement would be 18. I think we’re down to 17 at the minute. Of those, only two work-full time jobs, the rest of us can’t keep employment for any reasonable length of time.
“We had one lad with a full-time job in a shop but because of the training, they made him part-time because he couldn’t fulfil the duties. You can’t be relied on to be able to open or lock up the place.
“There’s another lad who has been with the same employer for 20 years and he’s fine but the employer says he wouldn’t take on another firefighter.”
Even the local authorities who run the services are reluctant now to hire firefighters for other roles they have because of the potential for disruption, he says.
A qualified electrician himself, the 37-year-old father of three young children, says he has considered leaving the service himself because of the poor pay and disruption.
“But from a young age, I always wanted to be a firefighter. It’s what I wanted to do. I don’t want to have to have another job. I would rather just be a firefighter but I’m also trying to look after the family and have a normal life.”
The report recommended changes to both pay and rostering structures and the Minister said he wanted to see the findings implemented but the Local Government Management Association has said it is unable to make proposals on remuneration that fall outside of the current national public pay sector agreement during its lifetime.
