Is next Wednesday's public sector strike now inevitable?
Ireland faces a major public sector strike as unions and the government fail to reach a successor agreement to the previous pay deal. The dispute centers on the timing of pay negotiations and the need for inflation protection, threatening significant disruption to public services.
Why it matters
The strike highlights the ongoing economic challenges of managing public sector wages against inflation and the necessity of productivity reforms.
The money is there and both sides say they want to do a deal so how are we facing into a massively disruptive public sector strike on Wednesday?
More than 300,000 workers including nurses, doctors, teachers and civil servants will engage in a 24-hour work stoppage and take to the picket lines.
It will lead to the closure of schools, the cancellation of hospital appointments and massive disruption to public services.
Unions are threatening another strike a week later on 21 October. So how did it come to this?
In the early hours of the morning of 26 January 2024, following overnight talks, bleary-eyed trade union negotiators and Government officials emerged from the Workplace Relations Commission to announce that a new public sector pay deal had been agreed.
It provided for pay increases of 10.25% and over a two-and-a-half-year period.
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