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2009

Frontline Alliance says today’s protests by ICTU are harnessing the anger of all PAYE workers to start campaign for a fairer deal

Date Released: 06 Nov 2009

The Government, IBEC and ISME have “played a blinder in repeatedly shifting the focus of blame for the current crisis away from their own incompetence and putting the blame on dedicated men and women in the public service, thus sowing division between public and private sectors”, AGSI General Secretary Joe Dirwan said this morning when urging members of the 24/7 Frontline Services Alliance to support the Irish Congress of Trade Unions marches throughout the State.

“The 24/7 Frontline Services Alliance represents people who are available 24 hours a day to provide the public with a service”, he said. “We attend accidents. We run the A&E departments. We deal with public order incidents and drunken fights after pubs close. We look after prisoners, we attempt to rehabilitate them and that is only a small part of what we do. We receive allowances and premium payments because of the work we do, just as private sector workers who operate at nights or bank holidays receive overtime and shift allowances.”

The Assistant General Secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association, Eugene Dennehy, said, “It is simply not acceptable to load Prison Officers and other 24/7 workers with the burden of rescuing a problem which is not of their making. We fully accept that private and public sectors must take part in addressing the current crisis – but we do not accept that the easy target in the public service is 24/7 staff who can be made carry the entire burden.”

SIPTU National Nursing Official Louise O’Reilly said members in frontline services, “whether in health or local authorities are extremely angry at being targeted by commentators and the McCarthy Report as overpaid and underworked. They portray our jobs as cosy, cosseted sinecures but most of them they would wilt in hours if they tried to carry out the dangerous and difficult tasks our members perform every day. We will be joining our brothers and sisters in the private sector today and raising the old PAYE slogan ‘Tax the Greedy, Not the Needy’.”

The General Secretary of the Psychiatric Nurses Association, Des Kavanagh, said “People do not realise the dreadful waste that indiscriminate cuts are causing. In nursing about 3,000 nurses will retire or resign this year. At the same time about 2,000 student nurses are graduating, almost none of whom will be employed in Ireland. If that is not waste, what is?”

The General Secretary of the Irish Nurses Organisation, Liam Doran, said, “The last few months have seen unfounded, unfair and unjustified attacks on front line workers, which crystallised in the McCarthy report. Our members are not pawns or statistics, they are gifted and committed individuals and our participation in today’s rallies is only the beginning of the fight to save our frontline services.”





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