The Minister for Justice Michael McDowell tonight gave prison officers 10 days to accept a final pay deal offer before the partial privatisation of the service begins.
Mr McDowell said there was a final window of opportunity for the state's 3,200 prison officers.
“I'm determined to bring about an end to a la carte overtime in the prison service and to return sanity to the service,” he said.
Prison officers have been offered essentially the same deal of annualised hours to cut the €60 million overtime bill, which they rejected overwhelmingly last April.
But some tweaks have been made so that prison officers are not forced to work overtime.
Mr McDowell said there had already been 300 meetings with the Prison Officers Association (POA), years of negotiations and the involvement of the Labour Relations Commission.
He said that he wanted a reply from the POA before Monday June 11 and if the answer was 'no', he would go ahead with his plan to privatise prison escorts and to hand the running of the country's remaining open prisons - Loughan House in Co Cavan and Shelton Abbey in Co Wicklow - to an independent agency.
Mr McDowell has also raised the possibility of getting a private company to run the replacement for Mountjoy prison in Thornton in Dublin and the new prison planned for Spike Island in Cork.
“I'm not in the business of giving ultimatums. I'm not trying to approach this in a Clint Eastwood type of way. The ball is in their court,” he said.
The Prison Officers Association said it was not optimistic that the deal would be accepted by its members
“As we said before, we don't believe the deal we've been offered will lead to a resolution and we're very disappointed that our proposal, which would have involved no additional cost to the exchequer, has been rejected,” said general secretary John Clinton.
PA