Republican News · Thursday 13 March 2003

Community groups debate partnership

BY ROBBIE SMYTH

You could be forgiven for forgetting that tens of thousands of workers, along with the unions they are members of and a range of community organisations, are still meeting this week to discuss and ballot on the sixth partnership agreement, Sustaining Progress.

Social partnership has dropped from the news bulletins, replaced with Fianna Fáil ministers either busy rewriting the law on freedom of information, or crowding into the executive boxes at Cheltenham, while unemployment and redundancy rates rise. At the same time, funding and management failures in the health service in Drogheda and Dublin provide the latest examples of chaos in our hospitals, leaving little time for discussing whether or not we should sign up for a new partnership agreement, or does it?

The news content this week is perhaps the perfect backdrop to discuss Sustaining Progress. It exposes the sham that is 'social partnership' and offer a perfect backdrop as to why the partnership agreement should be rejected.

With farming organisations still refusing to sign up to the deal, as employers' groups and trade unionists remain remarkably quiet on their deliberations, it has fallen to the 26 members of the Community Platform to make their position on the agreement known.

The Community Platform is to hold a special meeting of member groups later this month on 25 March, by which time all of its participant organisations will have completed their own internal discussions on Sustaining Progress.

Some groups have already made their position known, with CORI and the Vincent De Paul supporting and rejecting the new agreement, respectively.

The Simon Communities of Ireland, who run homeless shelters in Cork, Dublin, Cork and Galway while also being one of the most active lobbyists and campaigning groups on the homeless issue, have rejected the new partnership deal.

Simon believes that partnership has failed the homeless, saying the agreement has "no meaningful commitments" for people who are living in poverty. It further argues that the deal for 10,000 affordable houses will "not have any direct impact on the crisis faced by the people who are homeless".

Simon sends a strong message to the other members of the Community Platform, saying that organisations seeking to end homelessness will be voting no. It has accused the government of "reducing social partnership back to merely a pay deal".

Also calling a for No are the 700 members of the Community Workers Cooperative (CWC) who have said that "there is nothing in the new national agreement for those experiencing poverty or social exclusion".

Sean Regan, CWC national co-coordinator, criticising the agreement, said: "Ireland has deeply rooted inequality and social exclusion. In this agreement, choices were made to protect the better off and let those experiencing poverty and exclusion wait. The CWC, as an organisation committed to addressing social exclusion and poverty, cannot support these choices."

One union that has endorsed Sustaining Progress is the Irish Nurses Organisation, which this week accepted the deal by a margin of 67% to 33%. Other unions are still balloting and their collective verdicts will be the focus of an Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) special delegate conference on 26 March.

This meeting and the Community Platform conference the previous day will decide whether there will be a sixth Partnership Agreement.