TRADE UNIONS have warned the Government that December 9th – Budget Day – will go down in history as “a day of infamy” and that public servants will never forget the measures introduced.
Approximately 500 public servants last night attended a rally outside Leinster House organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions against cuts in the pay of staff on the State payroll.
Addressing the demonstration, the incoming general secretary of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) Sheila Nunan said that her members had “stood up before and would stand up again”.
She said that in the Budget business and banking interests had triumphed while public service workers had had to bear the brunt.
General secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions David Begg said there had been an effective campaign of incitement to hatred carried out against public servants over recent months. He said that had such a campaign been organised against people on the basis of race, gender or ethnic group it would have been illegal.
Mr Begg said that Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan had made an extraordinary statement at the weekend when he stated that the Government had already declared a war on one front.
“Is it not an extraordinary thing that the Government of the country would declare war on its own public servants?” he asked.
Mr Begg said that the hallmark of the Budget had been its unfairness, with “€70 million taken in terms of taxes from the wealthy while €760 million was taken from people on social welfare”.
In a prepared script, which had been circulated earlier by the INTO, Ms Nunan said social partnership was over. She also said that the offer of public service reform, which had been put forward by the unions as an alternative means of reducing the public sector pay bill without cutting pay rates, was now off the table.
“We discussed with Government a budgetary plan that included reform of public services. They threw it back in our faces,” she said. “Offer withdrawn. Game over,” she said.
Ms Nunan said that “a cowardly Government” had caved in to powerful vested interests and had unilaterally embarked upon an economic policy of asset stripping the public service and driving down all wages.
She warned that public services would be compromised by the Government’s budgetary policy which was doomed to failure, would crash the economy and worsen the current economic recession.