Leinster House today was filled with sympathy for Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport Patrick O’Donovan, who took ill during an EU presidency meeting in Limerick on Tuesday.
On today’s Inside Politics podcast host Hugh Linehan speaks to Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy and political correspondent Jack Horgan-Jones about the mood in the Dáil.
Fellow politicians “understand the stresses and challenges” of the job, Leahy said.
They also discuss today’s public sector strike and the likelihood of another next Wednesday.
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“Both sides have staked out their territory” Leahy said.
“The government has shown its willing to let people go out on strike, the unions have shown their prepared to go on strike.”
Unions say the threat of larger-scale walkouts in the dispute over the public sector pay deal aren’t off the table.
Horgan-Jones said, “Generationally no one in politics or the unions has dealt with something of this scale before”.
He added, however, that ”we haven’t reached the point of confronting what a full-scale public sector and Civil Service walkout would look like and the disruption it would cause”.
