Fórsa wants pay scales shortened as quickly as possible for staff who joined the public service after January 2011. The union has said a new talks process, agreed before Saint Patrick’s weekend, must lead to equal treatment for all public servants by removing two points from new entrant pay scales.

Proposed industrial action at Sunbeam House Services has been suspended by Fórsa after management agreed to a number of measures to expedite pay restoration at the Wicklow disability service providers.

The first meeting of a group set up to deal with Fórsa’s claim for the restoration of ‘twilight payments’ met last week. The payment – which saw staff paid at ‘time and one-sixth’ for working between six and eight o’clock in the evening – was discontinued in 2011.

Health service management has agreed to consider Fórsa’s proposal that superintendent structures in the civil registration service should mirror those in community healthcare organisations (CHO).

Fórsa will tomorrow (Wednesday) meet the health department’s review group that’s looking into private practice in Ireland’s public hospitals. The union has already made a written submission to the body, chaired by Ronan Toomey, in which it argued for state-employed consultants working exclusively for public patients.

In the last news bulletin we asked your opinion about a new report which said Brexit will hit the Irish economy more than any other country in Europe, with a ‘hard Brexit’ costing the country about €18billion.

We look at the main stories in the current edition of the news bulletin. Presented by Hazel Gavigan and Niall Shanahan