Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan has said pay and living standards are the “sole focus” for the union in public service talks, which formally got underway in the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) last week.

A second WRC meeting takes place on Monday (14th June), after which the pace is expected to pick up. Both sides believe the talks could be concluded quite quickly.

The talks, which were triggered by Fórsa on foot of the cost-of-living crisis, are discussing additional pay this year, beyond the modest increases set out in the Building Momentum agreement. The parties are also exploring the possibility of extending the current agreement into 2023.

Despite some media speculation, the public service talks are not discussing wider cost-of-living measures or tax and benefit changes, which are being explored in a separate process involving unions, Government and employers’ body Ibec. Early talks on this have been taking place in the Labour-Employer Economic Forum (LEEF), Ireland’s main social dialogue forum.

Last month, public expenditure minister Michael McGrath said the Government was willing to go beyond the pay terms in Building Momentum, though he has subsequently said the negotiations would be “difficult and challenging.”

The Government has also strongly indicated its desire to extend the current agreement into next year as this would increase certainty over the public service pay bill at a time of economic and geopolitical volatility. It would prefer to conclude an agreement on this in advance of October’s Budget.

In March, Fórsa and other unions triggered a review clause in Building Momentum, which says pay can be revisited if there’s a significant change in the economic assumptions that underpinned the deal. The union’s general secretary Kevin Callinan argued that nobody had predicted high and sustained inflation when the deal was negotiated in late 2020 and put to ballot in early 2021.

"Since we triggered this review three months ago things have got a lot worse. We want to see what the Government is prepared to do to revise the terms of the current agreement.

"We've made it clear that our sole focus is on pay, the cost of the living, and the way in which inflation is impacting on workers and their families. The terms of Building Momentum haven't measured up against the cost of living, and this wasn’t the intention of any of the parties when we negotiated the deal" he said.

Fórsa’s national conference, which took place in Killarney last month, heard calls for extra pay increases on foot of the cost-of-living crisis.

Subsequently, 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."

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