Public expenditure minister Michael McGrath has said the Government is willing to go beyond the pay terms in the Building Momentum public service agreement. But added that this must be done in a “balanced” way.

Speaking after Fórsa’s national conference heard calls for extra pay increases on foot of the cost of living crisis, Mr McGrath said: “We are prepared to go beyond the pay terms within the current agreement but we need to balance that against the risk of doing any long-term harm to the economy, the public finances and the competitiveness of the Irish economy into the future."

This echoed the line of Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) negotiators when they met Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan and other senior union negotiators for exploratory talks over the las fortnight.

They confirmed that the current agreement’s pay terms would be discussed in substantive talks, and said the Government also wanted to achieve some certainty about next year’s public service pay bill before October’s Budget.

The Workplace Relations Commission, which helped broker the Building Momentum deal, is expected to get involved in formal discussions between DPER and the officers of the ICTU Public Services Committee (PSC) in the next week or so.

Delegates at last week’s Fórsa national conference backed a motion from the organisation’s elected executive, which put pay at the top of the union’s negotiating priorities. Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan told the conference he would pursue this with a “single-minded determination.”

Kevin said he didn’t underestimate the scale of the challenge in the talks, but added that there was now a solid basis for substantial negotiations as the employers’ side had acknowledged that the inflation assumptions underpinning Building Momentum have changed significantly.

“Workers, their families, and their communities are the victims of inflation, not the cause of inflation. I have made it clear that there needs to be an improvement in the agreement’s pay terms this year,” he said.