ONLY ‘HUGE OFFER’ COULD HALT RAIL STRIKES

IT would take ‘an offer of huge significance’ for rail workers to call off the first of their five planned days of 24-hour work stoppages, according to union sources.

Rail workers last Friday formally announced their intention to down tools on five occasions over the coming weeks, bringing the country’s rail network to a halt on a number of key dates – including the day of Ireland’s crucial World Cup qualifier against Denmark in Dublin on November 14.

A senior union source yesterday told the Irish Daily Mail they feel it is unlikely there will be any significant intervention prior to the first day of industrial action on November 1, as they believe they won’t be asked to be returned to the Workplace Relations Commission where talks broke down last week.

And the unions have already said they will not go to the Labour Court, despite a letter being issued from its chairman Kevin Foley in August urging all parties to return to the forum if the most recent bout of WRC talks proved to be unsuccessful – which they ultimately did.

A senior union source, close to one of the unions involved, said: ‘I will tell you this with conviction, the WRC won’t be calling us back in.’

They said ‘it would be very unusual at this juncture now for them to come back in again, to what would be a seventh or eighth time’, but added that the WRC is ‘always available to the parties’.

When asked about interventions to avoid the industrial action, the source – who was closely involved in last week’s discussions which broke down after 12 hours in the WRC – said: ‘I suspect Wednesday week [November 1] is going to go ahead.

‘It would take an offer of huge significance for that to be called off.

‘As far as the unions were concerned – even though the company denied it – we were heading in the direction which would have produced a proposal of beyond 1.75%. So whatever that figure was, or potentially was, is now higher because of what happened.’

Since the talks broke down late last Thursday night, Irish Rail has asked the unions to return with them to the Labour Court. But the two main unions involved in the dispute – Siptu and the National Bus and Rail Union – said this will not happen.

Dermot O’Leary, general secretary of the NBRU, last week claimed: ‘The Labour Court is the last resort and it should be available to the parties to bridge a gap – considerably

‘The WRC won’t be calling us in’

less than the gap that is between us now’.

However, Irish Rail yesterday said: ‘While the gap is still a significant one, it is far less than it was. So I’ve no idea what the trade unions fear from finishing the process rather than disrupting the travelling public, losing their members money.’

He said there is ‘no justification for industrial action’ in this scenario.

Comment – Page 10 emmajane.hade@dailymail.ie