Ceisteanna ar Pholasaí nó ar Reachtaíocht - Questions on Policy or Legislation
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-30
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Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

I am not one for games or all sorts of industrial relations, IR, mechanisms and processes. I will be straight with the Deputy: that is a nonsense statement. There will be a substantial provision in the budget and the Estimates next week for public service pay. How can anybody credibly say we are not prepared to discuss pay? Come on. Everybody knows that is not true. Let us have a bit of common sense here. There will be a public service pay offer. It is well known. We are open to negotiations.
In any pay agreement, by the way, we discuss a whole range of issues pertaining to public service reforms and local pay bargaining. A whole range of issues get discussed in the context of a pay agreement. We have invited the unions in; there should not be this industrial action, in my view. The previous two agreements were beneficial, particularly to lower-paid workers, and were above inflation. If you look at the increase in public service pay, it has been quite dramatic. I think it has gone from about €21 billion in 2018 to €36 billion in the present day. There has been a very substantial increase in public service pay but, of course, pressures have grown as well because of all the crises we have experienced. We were very responsive during the Covid-19 pandemic to workers generally. We responded with agility and so on. It is not fair for the Deputy to say what he just said.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-30