The Postgraduate Workers Organisation (PWO) marched from Stephen’s Green to the Department of Further and Higher Education at noon in protest of Wednesday’s public sector pay deal. Following the suspension of the 24-hour work stoppage in the early hours of Wednesday morning, unions will take the time to individually ballot members and agree to the terms of the deal. As unrecognised workers, the PWO feels largely excluded from the marginal benefits of the pay agreement between the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and the government.
PWO President Eden Skehan led around fifty protesters, many of them PhD researchers across Dublin universities, including Trinity and UCD. Legal observers, part of a network organised by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), were present, taking account of Gardaí presence and potential developments. Walking from Stephen’s Green to the Department of Further and Higher Education, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, protesters eagerly chanted in the streets.
Protests align with the arrival of dozens of EU leaders for an EU Presidency summit hosted by Ireland as its President. Heavy traffic disruptions and a large Garda presence are expected for the next several days, including road closures and restrictions to College’s main campus and off-campus buildings. Initially, PWO planned to demonstrate on campus, but relocated to Stephen’s Green, explicitly citing recent Garda retaliation against protesters on campus at Hunter Biden’s visit to the Hist on Tuesday.
“All of us are relatively excluded from some of the benefits of the deal, because we’re paid such a low wage”, Skehan told the University Times. Certain items of the pay deal are deeply concerning to the PWO, including stipulations on industrial action that Skehan called “collective punishment” and the implementation of AI programmes within the public sector. PWO Vice President Cathal Ó Faoláin, alongside representatives from the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT), the Teachers Union of Ireland, and SIPTU, presented to the joint committee on Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science today at half past noon.
“The Government’s rhetoric over the last few months has been shameful. They promised a ‘workers’ budget’ but gave us one that left workers worse off in real terms”, PWO President Daniel O’Laocha wrote to the University Times. Among chief complaints concerning the deal are that the pay increases will not actually meet or go beyond anticipated inflation rates. “Workers’ pay is going down in real terms as costs go up”, O’Laocha affirmed. “And that’s the workers who have full-time employment. Increasingly, the public sector is hiring people with short-term and part-time contracts. In universities, over a third of research and teaching staff considered themselves precariously employed according to IFUT’s precarious employment report”.
