Ictu and the wailers

As the argument developed and both men rose to their feet, Cody pointed out that there are many lower-paid public-service staff outside the ranks of Horan's Civil, Public & Services Union. Horan shot back that Impact's members - including hundreds of middle-management civil servants - were so well paid they wouldn't miss increments.

Colleagues were aghast at the exchange. When the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) executive council chose the Bob Marley anthem Get Up, Stand Up as the theme for its campaign against pay and spending cuts, it did not expect trade union leaders to take the slogan so literally.

But while political leaders, including John Gormley, the Green party leader, have likened tensions between the public and private sector as akin to "civil war", the clash between Cody and Horan showed that differences have even emerged among the public-sector unions about how to avoid pay cuts next year. United they have stood. Divided, will they fall?

"YOU might as well cut my basic pay if you cut allowances," said prison officer Karl Dalton from St Patrick's Institution as he marched across Dublin with his colleagues from the Prison Officers' Association last Friday. "I'm already down €4,500 this year, between the pension levy and the health levy. I'm paying a mortgage and I have a wife and three children, and I don't have surplus cash sitting there.

"We work at weekends, we go in on nights, we go in on Christmas Day. If you take away our allowances, that is the same as taking my basic pay."

Joe O'Hanlon, a psychiatric nurse at the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum, says his standard of living has dropped due to the 7% pension levy and 4% health levy. He fears that a weekend-working allowance will be next.

"Why would you go in on a Sunday to work for normal pay?" he asks. "Or night duty, or anything like that. Sunday is double time, night duty is double time after the first few hours, and so is Saturday working. People would take a huge financial loss if they were to lose that and they just wouldn't work it."

For members of the 24/7 Frontline Services Alliance - an alliance of unions representing nurses, prison officers, gardai, fire and ambulance personnel, and members of the defence forces - overtime and "allowances" (premium payments for shift work on nights, weekends and holidays) make up, on average, 22% of their annual income.

Lower-paid workers such as hospital cleaners face a different type of challenge from Brian Lenihan's determination to trim €1.3 billion from the €20 billion public-sector pay bill next year. These workers are at the lowest-paid end of the public sector, where, ironically, the largest gaps between public- and private-sector pay rates were identified in a study by the Economic and Social Research Institute.

For example, the 25% premium enjoyed by public-sector cleaning staff over private-sector counterparts is increasingly viewed as an argument by Health Service Executive management for redundancies and outsourcing of this work, according to trade union sources.

Gerry Costigan, a teacher in Our Lady of Mercy secondary school in Beaumont, is at the other end of the pay league table but marched last Friday against the education cutbacks to date and against the rise in the pupil-to-teacher ratio he expects to be announced in next month's budget.

"Book grants are being taken away from disadvantaged students. The school liaison scheme which provides teaching services to disadvantaged kids, a lot of those have been taken away in the last five or six months," he said.

"We let one out of 23 or 24 staff go last year. With proposed cuts you can see another teacher at least going next year. History has gone off the Leaving Cert cycle for the fifth year because we haven't the numbers to justify it with the staff we have."

Costigan says he has taken on extra responsibility, acquired extra qualifications and worked for 30 years to reach the €70,000 he earns, the top of his pay scale as a second-level teacher. If he could see the government "going after other people, if they allowed a bank to fail, if we could see the pain being spread", then the scope for savings in the public sector might be easier to address.

Public servants dominated the 30,000-strong crowd that braved harsh winds and rain to assemble at Dublin's Parnell Square on Friday in support of Ictu's Get Up, Stand Up campaign against proposed pay and spending cuts. Smatterings of private-sector marchers were among the state-paid workers: the painters' and decorators' section of Siptu; half a dozen members of Ucatt, a construction union; 20 or so journalists from the NUJ; and a group of Boots' workers protesting against the pharmacy group's proposed lower-pay regime.

The Irish Nurses Organisation (INO), by contrast, was scarcely visible. Perhaps it was saving energy for a 1,000-member march by the 24/7 Frontline Services Alliance to the Dail on Wednesday. Or perhaps Liam Doran, the INO general secretary, is waiting for a reply from Peter McLoone of Impact to last week's letter from the alliance seeking a meeting to co-ordinate the trade unions' approach to the talks with government. The alliance has yet to receive a response.

Evidence of Ictu's €1.5m war chest to fight the Get Up, Stand up campaign was everywhere. There was a sea of colour: free T-shirts, placards, whistles, flags. But the mood was not festive. Jack O'Connor, Siptu's general secretary, spoke in grim tones of an entire political, media and corporate establishment being massed against the trade union movement on the issues of pay, social welfare and job security.

David Begg, the Ictu secretary general, said: "All this stuff about reducing public-sector wages is only so they can then reduce private-sector wages. Then they will have to reduce the minimum wage, then they will have to reduce social welfare because it will be uneconomic for people to work."

Begg cited Nobel prize-winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, The Financial Times and The Economist as supporters of a slower path to fiscal correction. Ictu's 10-point plan for recovery would return the country to a budget surplus by 2017 instead of 2013, as agreed by Lenihan under the EU stability and growth pact. But is it really the "better, fairer way" it has been branded by Congress?

Rossa White, chief economist with the research division of Davy Stockbrokers, rejects it out of hand. "I think it is crazy. I don't think we can delay and try to do what we did from 1982 to 1987," he said. "All the progress we have made so far in getting those [interest rate] spreads down - investors will just charge a much higher rate when the new bond issues come up again. I don't think it is feasible.

"Consumers would have no idea of when tax increases will come to an end, and that would have a [further] damaging impact on spending."

Under Lenihan's path to budget balance in 2013, our debt-to-GDP ratio will peak at "well below 100%" since borrowings for the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) will be off the books, said White. The Congress approach would breach the 100% debt-to-GDP ratio and the country couldn't continue indefinitely with that approach, he believes.

White also dismisses Begg's tax-hike alternative to public-sector wage cuts. "There is a point at which we will find it harder to attract skilled labour because of higher taxes and it will push up wage demands when the economy starts to stabilise next year," he said.

BRIAN COWEN, the taoiseach, made a telling intervention in the government/trade union talks 10 days ago when he invited Ictu to come up with alternatives to basic-pay cuts for public servants. Buoyed by ratification of the Lisbon treaty, the passage of Nama legislation through the Dail, and agreement with the Green party on a new programme for government, Cowen has found a spring in his step absent for much of his stewardship as taoiseach.

Playing good cop to Lenihan's pay-cutting bad cop, Cowen told the trade-union movement he wasn't hell-bent on achieving the €1.3 billion saving by cutting core pay alone. If the unions could trim a similar amount from the public-sector pay bill by a different mechanism, he would happily take that route, provided it led to the same destination. That theme now dominates the talks.

And so, last week, in parallel with Ictu's Get Up, Stand Up campaign and its 10-point plan for recovery with its 2017 finishing line, the public-sector unions began inching their own proposals onto the table for streamlining the public service, doing the same job for less money and using fewer bodies on the public-sector payroll.

A deal may yet be done with the unions before the end of November. It won't be a new national wage agreement but if it sets the public service on the road to a streamlined, customer-focused future, the government would regard it as of more lasting benefit than much of the social partnership dividend over the past 20 years.