A new industrial relations agreement between Fórsa and Ryanair, which covers the airline’s directly-employed pilots, sets out how the two parties will conduct industrial relations and resolve disputes in future. 

The union believes the agreement, which settles Ryanair’s long-running legal battle against the union, holds out the prospect of normalised industrial relations in the company after a difficult relationship in the four years since the airline first recognised Fórsa in December 2017.

Fórsa also welcomed the accompanying legal settlement reached last month, which saw the airline drop its €13.7 million claim against the union for damages it said it incurred after industrial action notice was served in 2019.

The industrial relations agreement acknowledges the role of the State’s industrial relations machinery in the resolution of future disputes, and says that “this agreement is an industrial relations agreement and the provisions thereof are not enforceable by legal action in a court of law.”

This was welcomed by Fórsa, not lease because it reaffirms the voluntarist nature of Irish industrial relations, where agreements are not treated as legally-binding contracts.

The agreement also recognises that “nothing in the agreement shall prevent the company or the union from exercising or relying upon their respective legal rights and entitlements” and acknowledges the freedom of each party to “take lawful measures as it thinks appropriate” in response to a failure of the other party to comply with their obligations under the agreement.

An analysis by the respected journal Industrial Relations News (IRN) opined that, aside from Fórsa, few unions in Ireland had the resources to go toe-to-toe with a powerful multinational company. It quoted a source saying: “The scale of the damaged that were sought in the Ryanair case would pose an ‘existential threat’ to most individual unions, here and in Britain.”

It concluded that “instead, Fórsa and Ryanair have ended up with a straightforward industrial relations agreement – not a legally-binding document that might have weakened the ability of unions to negotiate the sort of agreements that have been the mark of Ireland’s voluntarist system.”

It noted that the two organisations have already shown their ability to conclude agreements in respect of Ryanair cabin crew, including a recognition agreement in 2018 and an emergency pandemic-related agreement last year.

Aside from legal costs arising the airline’s successful application for a court injunction against the proposed industrial action in August 2019, each side is to meet its own legal costs.