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Jack O’Connor, General President, addressing the Northern Regional Conference of SIPTU in City Hotel, Derry, on Saturday, October 28, 2006

It is an honour to address the Northern Regional Conference of SIPTU at an important time in the history of the North, and in the history of our Union. The next few months will be crucial in determining whether the government of Northern Ireland returns to its people and our own resolve will be tested, north and south, in ensuring a greater say for organised workers in reforming two very unequal societies.

Today unions such as SIPTU, are one of the few bulwarks that remain against unfettered big business and its neo-liberal allies in government who are intent on appropriating what remains of publicly owned assets and services. This is nothing new. We have a long and proud tradition of defending the public good.

It is almost 100 years since Jim Larkin came to Ireland and raised his banner of ‘divine discontent’ in Belfast. At the time it was the greatest industrial centre on this island but bitterly divided. The Belfast dock strike of 1907 and the great social upheaval it provoked united catholic and protestant workers in a way never seen before and, regrettably, rarely seen since. It marked the beginning of modern trade unionism in Ireland and led very quickly to the foundation of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and, ultimately, to the formation of SIPTU.

Today SIPTU is one of the largest civil society organisations on this island and it continues to operate north and south in the interests of all working people. It is in that capacity that I made a call earlier this week for the return of devolved government. The leaders of all the parties in the North have an unrivalled opportunity, in the wake of the St. Andrew’s Agreement, to return power to the people and finally realise the long delayed ‘peace dividend’.

Direct rule has been bad for the economy, bad for workers and bad for democracy. It has imposed unacceptable economic and social costs on the community at large, including rates increases, the introduction of water charges, education and health cuts, as well as allowing anonymous bureaucrats and absentee politicians to preside over continuing economic decline. Some 539,000 people, 41 per cent of the total population of working age, are consigned to economic inactivity and 25 per cent of households are classified as poor. Average incomes in the North are only 80 per cent of those in Britain.

Nor is the economic impact of partition restricted to people north of the border. People in the border counties have average incomes worth only 90 per cent of the average in the Republic, and 80 per cent of those enjoyed by those living in Dublin.

As you know, SIPTU is organised on a regional basis and close to 14,500 members in the Northern Region cover the nine counties of historic Ulster, plus Louth and Leitrim. Like the vast majority of workers, of all political persuasions, they want to see local, democratic institutions restored to Northern Ireland so that the whole region can benefit. After all devolved government is an integral part of the Good Friday agreement, and it provides the only road to a better future for all. It will also give a new dynamism to cross-border infrastructural projects to promote transport, energy, educational and tourism links.

I know that Unionist leaders have reacted negatively to the €100 billion Cross-Border package for co-operation on infrastructure, proposed by the British and Irish governments yesterday. However I take some comfort from the reaction of Gregory Campbell of the DUP. While he began by warning that, “What we will be saying to Dublin is that if your understanding of this arrangement is that this money is designed to build up an all-Ireland economy, we are not going there”, he added that, “What we will do is work with you in developing the concept of two adjoining countries who want to build up the structures of both countries.”

Certainly there is plenty to do on that front and, to be frank, the possibility of cross-border investment fast-forwarding a united Ireland is hopelessly misplaced. As former ESRI economist John Bradley points out in the Irish Times yesterday, our economies are continuing to diverge and will probably do so for some time. That of the South is one of the most open and globalised in the world, while that of the North remains relatively isolated and dependent on Britain for its main markets. As he points out, Poland is more relevant to supplying the Republic’s labour market needs than Northern Ireland.

In fact large scale inward migration has become a fact of life in the Republic, as it has in the North. Ironically, as we lose many low skilled and not so low skilled jobs in the manufacturing sector on both sides of the Border to low wage economies, many people in developing countries come here in search of a better life. There is no doubt but that the ‘second wind’ of the southern economy, has been due in part to the decision to open our borders, north and south, to the ten new EU accession states.

Unfortunately it was not accompanied, as we wanted, by enhanced protection of employment rights in the workplace, or even enforcement of existing rights. SIPTU has been to the fore in exposing abuses of foreign workers in both high profile disputes such as Gama and Irish Ferries, and in countless smaller battles in sectors such as construction, meat processing and mushroom farming. We also helped lead the ICTU campaign that led, in talks on the new national agreement ‘Towards 2016, to securing commitments that this problem would be addressed in a series of major initiatives. These include the creation of an Office of Director for Employment Rights Compliance, adequately resourced with legal and financial expertise as well as the appointment of 90 labour inspectors, compared with just 14 inspectors two years ago. There will also be far greater co-ordination between the new directorate, the gardai, Social Welfare and the Revenue Commissioners to track down and tackle rogue employers and labour agencies.

I do not doubt that it will take every ounce of skill and determination by the trade union movement to see that those commitments are delivered upon and, even if they are, we know that workers will only enjoy the benefits secured by legislation if we continue to educate, organise and mobilise them through the trade union movement.

I also want to stress that we are not opposed to workers coming to Ireland from other countries. Countless generations of Irish people have had to travel abroad in the past to find jobs. What we are opposed to is the exploitation of this situation by unscrupulous employers to drive down pay and working conditions for everyone. If we allow this to happen we also allow an objective basis to emerge for the promotion of racism.

I don’t need to tell delegates here today of the high price that divisions on the basis of race, or colour, or religion, or ethnicity can exact on a society; or that those who suffer most in such a society are ordinary working people. Unfortunately PSNI figures for the year ending last May show that racist attacks rose by 15 per cent to 936 in Northern Ireland and a Life & Times Survey in 2005 showed that 25 per cent of people are prejudiced against ethnic minorities.

I believe a major aggravating factor in this scenario, is that many of those who feel threatened by inward migration lack basic skills and qualifications that leave them either unemployed or working in vulnerable, often unorganised sectors of the economy, where their jobs are at risk in even the best of times. This, in turn, reflects the under-developed state of the Northern economy, including under resourcing of education, training, research and development. Forty-seven per cent of children leaving school lack any qualifications at all and 25 per cent of the workforce lacks functional literacy.

A similar, if less drastic, level of under-education prevails in the Republic, where 70 per cent of workers have only primary or second level education. Yesterday the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheal Martin, admitted to a National Skills Conference in Dublin, that 950,000 of the jobs created between now and 2020 will require people with higher level qualifications and that almost a third of these positions will have to be filled by inward migration.

This relentless drive to create a ‘knowledge economy’ on the cheap is driven by a narrow focus on economic growth whose main aim is not to create a better life for all of those living on this island, but to maximise profits for employers; many of whom will happily transfer their operations elsewhere when the collateral social damage of their activities finally begins to register.

As trade unionists we have wider obligations and far higher aspirations. We must make ensure that education and training take priority over short-term profits. We need policies from governments, north and south, that promote business organisations prepared to invest in further education and upskilling for existing employees, while also offering basic training to new recruits. We also need policies that will make third level education much more accessible and promote research in growth sectors such as biomedicine.

Infrastructural investment can also generate employment and put people on the education-employment ladder. I fully support the ICTU proposals for Derry to become a Gateway for the entire North-West, and the extension of the National Development Plan for the West to link up with a border corridor, including a rail link from Limerick and Derry, via Sligo and Strabane.

We must insist that such major civil engineering projects are not used simply to provide short term employment opportunities for jobless or relatively low skilled workers. As well as insisting on enforcement of minimum labour standards on such projects we must insist that contractors put in place training programmes that will, at the very least, result in the enhanced employability of those workers once the job ends. It is by these incremental measures and by integrating education and training structures from apprenticeship to doctorate level that we can create a genuine knowledge economy and one where the principal beneficiaries will be the knowledge economy workers themselves, regardless of where they come from.

Achieving this will take a lot more work and an ability to discriminate between measures that simply boost short term growth and those that deliver sustainable social progress. Peter Bunting, the Assistant General Secretary of Congress, has been kind enough to draw my attention to a poem Jerusalem 2 by the Northern poet John Hewitt, who highlights the danger of confusing spin with substance.

Though men may clamour ‘Why delay?
We want this visioned state today’.
Take care you do not offer them
Some jerry-built Jerusalem.

Another man with Ulster roots and a founding father of our Union, James Connolly, understood very well the need to build industrial organisation as a necessary precondition to securing real social change. There are a lot of New Jerusalems on offer and possibly more of them available in this corner of Ireland than anywhere else on earth. But I would urge all of you to follow Connolly’s advice and build SIPTU. The stronger our Union becomes the more forceful our message will become in attaining the sort of New Jerusalem we want.



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