THE Dublin Trades Council has declared that it is not the job of local authority workers to knock on doors in pursuit of the controversial 100 euro Household Charge austerity tax imposed by the Irish coalition government.
The Dublin Council of Trade Unions stated yesterday: ‘We do not think it is the job of local authority workers to engage in a propaganda exercise in favour of payment or otherwise.’
‘It’s not our role – that’s the role of the Fine Gael party or the Coalition, if they want to do it.
‘We believe workers have the right to exercise their conscience and say: We’re not going to do that’.’
The chief executive of the Local Government Management Agency, Paul McSweeney, however, said that staff who refuse to collect could face action.
81-year-old grandmother Mai FitzGerald has lived through 26 different governments and experienced several crippling recessions, but she has finally had enough.
The grandmother of nine has vowed to go to prison before she will pay the 100 euro household levy.
‘I am very adamant about this. It is another tax and we have been hit too much. I will do jail, it does not bother me now,’ she said.
Originally from Lattin-Cullen, Co Tipperary, Mrs FitzGerald moved to Limerick in the 1960s.
Her husband Frank died 25 years ago, and she has four daughters and one son.
She says she will ‘definitely not’ be changing her stance on the 100 euro charge.
Mrs FitzGerald has just a few requirements should she end up behind bars.
‘I am a pioneer all my life. I don’t drink or smoke. So I’m fine so long as I can get the papers in and a few good books.’
She said the Government had to scrap the household levy.
‘I think this is just another tax on people and the people that brought it in don’t understand at all how others are living because they (TDs) have pregnant wallets.
‘They suffer from a multitude of deranged ideas,’ she added.
With the Fine Gael-led Government just over a year in power, Mrs FitzGerald said she believed it was the same as its predecessors.
‘They (the Government) should be looking after the elderly better than they are looking after them. They cut us in our fuel this year – imagine!’
Her father was a classmate of Sean Treacy, who was involved in the Soloheadbeg ambush in 1919.
‘At my age, you have to think of the way the country goes. It is gone – buggered.’
Mrs FitzGerald said the only harsher time she had experienced in the country was life during World War Two.
Meanwhile, eleven jobs in a number of vital drug support projects across Dublin will be lost because of a Minister’s decision to withdraw funding.
Just before Christmas and without warning the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government, Phil Hogan, decided to cut funding – provided under the national drugs strategy – from three projects in Inchicore: St Michael’s Estate, Fatima Mansions and Dolphin House; Dolphins Barn in the Canals area and from STAR, the Family Support Centre, in Ballyfermot.
In a further blow last month, four community projects in Killinarden and Fettercairn in Tallaght and in South West and North Clondalkin also had their funding withdrawn.
The projects affected came together to forge a joint strategy in response to the cuts, and with the help of local communities, trade unions and elected representatives, managed to force the minister into granting a temporary reprieve – and extend funding for a further six months until the end of June 2012.
However, the funding threat remains, and the move to cut a total of 375,000 euros in funding means 11 workers in the eight projects will lose their jobs and the most disadvantaged public housing areas in the capital will lose vital services.
Each of these projects was set up through the local drug task forces and under the Government’s commitment to tackle the drugs crisis that still ravages these communities.
In effect, despite a commitment in the Programme for Government, the Minister for the Environment has unilaterally abandoned the national drugs strategy at a time when there is a marked increase in the misuse of hard drugs, due mainly to the recession, causing severe disruption in these communities.
• SIPTU will mobilise up to 3,000 members in the Home Help service as part of a major campaign to highlight the threat to jobs in the sector that has resulted from the granting of contracts to a private ‘for profit’ company.
SIPTU Health Division Organiser, Paul Bell, said the decision to mobilise members in the Home Help service followed the failure of the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the Department of Health to meet union representatives to discuss concerns relating to the privatisation of services in Dublin and Wicklow.
Paul Bell said; ‘We have been extremely patient since the HSE announced the awarding of a contract for home help services and home care packages to a private “for profit” company almost three weeks ago. It has been claimed that the awarding of the new contract will lead to the creation of 600 new home help positions.
‘Since that announcement SIPTU has been consistently frustrated by the HSE and Department of Health in its attempts to convene a meeting for the purpose of communicating our view that the contract, as awarded, will actually displace home helps in the voluntary sector in Dublin and Wicklow.
‘SIPTU urgently needs to discuss what the HSE and the Government intend to do in order to secure the employment of our members and the quality of the service which home helps provide to some of the most vulnerable citizens in our community,’ Paul Bell said.
However the huge pay cuts for staff on the State payroll have caused an existential threat to the trade union movement, a former public service trade union leader has said.
Blair Horan, who retired this month after 24 years as general secretary of the Civil Public and Service Union (CPSU) – representing lower-paid public service staff – said this period was probably the most challenging in his career.
When ‘social partnership’ ended there was a view that ‘just as we had negotiated the increases on the upside, we now had a responsibility to negotiate the reduction on the downside using the same structure’.
He said he was opposed to this view as, on the one hand, the lower-paid would lose out and, secondly, he would not have an organisation if he didn’t as left-wing elements in the CPSU were determined to resist it because of childcare and huge mortgage costs.
‘It was a huge existential threat to the movement. We saw that in terms of how other unions had to deal with it. We had huge battles on our own side. Sometimes the biggest battles are not in the management/union negotiations but are in the internal negotiations.
‘We had huge battles on our own side. We never fell out but we had huge battles within the movement. I would be the first to recognise that I was representing people on lower to average pay.
‘Others had to deal with circumstances where they were representing members with a span of income. Also others were probably in sectors more threatened with compulsory redundancies than we were.’
After the pay cuts the CPSU launched a campaign of industrial action in the Civil Service – most memorably in the Passport Office. However, Horan said that despite the huge controversy surrounding the dispute, without it the subsequent agreement that staff earning less than 35,000 euros would be first to benefit from any reimbursement of the cuts would never have materialised.
Horan said once the commitment on the reimbursement for those earning less than 35,000 euros had been secured as part of the Croke Park deal, ‘I was clear in my mind that we had achieved the best that was possible to achieved as a negotiated settlement and I have supported it ever since’.
Horan said he did not think in the next 10 years that there would be any return to the influence the trade unions had under the social partnership.
‘I think ultimately the social partnership system failed because of the incompatibility between the agendas on the government side as against the other actors.
‘When I look back, a social partnership approach was not compatible with the extreme neo-liberal economic policy the government was following and that ultimately brought about its demise.’
