Public Pay Talks - see mod warning post 4293

An allowance needs to be for the greater dublin area. The commuter belt isn't cheap to live in either. Leixlip, Maynooth, Celbridge, Bray, Ashbourne etc will all have to be catered for.

It would be based on where you work. Not where you live.

Never going to happen anyway.

A Dublin allowance won't happen ,I doubt its something the unions would fight for either.

@yabadabado We saw how eager during the McCreevy decentralisation insanity how eager the unions were to sell their Dublin members down the river for the sake of a few promotion posts "down the country".

@Ollie321 You can't dencentralise Intreo offices, Gardai, nurses, teachers, council staff... and as far as civil service was concerned most of the low hanging fruit was harvested well before McCreevy.

Didn't really work out so well last time. Retirements caused the loss of a lot of tacit knowledge, and then people simply stagnated in regional offices as there was no where for them to move to.

Besides any future decentralisation would more likely take the form of shared hubs.

A Dublin allowance wouldn't be for all, only for critical services i.e. Gardai, nurses, teachers etc. Defining those services is where it becomes very difficult.

I don't see the point in discussing it too much. It isn't going to happen. A broader pay agreement for all that brings peoples pay broadly in line with inflation is the key deliverable of these talks. Demanding more from the unions is unrealistic (I am not saying you are demanding it).

Well you would just define them as critical then and give them the allowance.

Effectively, you only want the Dublin allowance for roles that require people in Dublin. We have no choice but to have teachers, nurses etc. based in Dublin and there should be a premium given to that. Procurement people can work from anywhere, there is no requirement for them to be in Dublin like other roles. Hence, in my eyes, they wouldn't be eligible for it. The thinking is relatively obvious. Whether someone would agree with or not is a different matter and, as already said, prolly for a different thread.

I am not going to get into a back and forth over what is critical or not. That would be my take on a Dublin allowance, you think everyone should get it. Grand.

You can move procurement outside of Dublin in its entirety with little to no effect on services. Again, I'll just agree to disagree. Very little relevance to the public pay talks really.

How would they introduce a Dublin allowance, most workers are outside Dublin and would vote against it. And the union would suffer if they tried to push it through.

Decentralisation won't work until there is a critical mass of senior level civil servants willing to operate in these decentralised areas. To be willing, they can't be spending half of their week travelling back to Dublin to attend meetings in person at the central location.

The reality is that the real decision makers are Dublin based and that shapes the rest.

There are examples of decentralisation that have worked really well, where operational divisions have been moved to, or set up from scratch outside of Dublin, like NSSO and Justice Finance in Killarney, DSP Childrens Allowance in Donegal, Revenue collections in Limerick and more. These aren't policy folks, and don't have huge engagement with other teams and other Departments. They just get on with their own processing jobs.

Simply put, the offers shouldn't be in Dublin. Someone working in procurement could just as easily work from an office in Mullingar as in Dublin. The same can't be said for a teacher for example.