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Union leaders tonight threatened to stage a second national strike unless agreement is struck with Government when crunch talks start tomorrow.
As public servants began to lift pickets across the country, officials revealed they were prepared to consider temporary measures to slash payroll costs without pay cuts.
It is understood proposals being tabled include extending the working day, changing flexi-time arrangements and reducing overtime bills.
Hospitals, schools, social welfare offices and local authorities shut down as workers staged walkouts around the country over plans to slash €1.3bn from the public sector wage bill.
Peter McLoone, Impact general secretary, said intense talks would continue over the weekend in a bid to avert a second strike on Thursday December 3 – just days before the Budget.
“The negotiations we are about to enter into, in our judgment, will be difficult, challenging and complex,” he warned.
“I believe it is possible to agree an alternative that will achieve the savings the Government requires in 2010 and beyond while rapidly agreeing and introducing reforms which will protect public services and the incomes of those who deliver them.”
Around 250,000 public servants downed tools around the country with pickets mounted at several Government departments, outside the Dáil and at prisons and fire stations.
However, flood relief workers and emergency staff in Clare, Galway and Cork were allowed to continue work to deal with the worst flooding in living memory in parts of the west and south.
Union leaders said critical medical services, including intensive, elderly and maternity care as well as cancer services would not be affected.
Mr McLoone, of the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), said the action demonstrated members have the resolve and the strength to resist the Government if it pursues an unfair and counter-productive course of further pay cuts.
However he revealed a blueprint for an overhaul of the public sector handed over on Friday night by the Government put the difficulties facing the negotiators into stark relief.
Mr McLoone said unions wanted to agree an approach to real public service reform that can protect vital services over the next three-four years as budgets and staff numbers decline.
He also admitted it would be necessary to agree some temporary measures to cut payroll costs in 2010 because reforms were unlikely to deliver the necessary savings before 2011.
“Our ambition is to negotiate a deal that motivates public servants to be part of a transformation that allows us to come out of this recession with better and more responsive public services at a lower cost to the taxpayer,” added Mr McLoone.
“This will be far more difficult, but it has the potential to really transform our public services in a way that a series of de-motivating pay cuts never will.”
Congress said all the public servant unions have mandates for further strike action except the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants (AHCPS) and the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT), both of which balloted for a one-day strike only.
INTO’s Sheila Nunan said public servants had already saved the taxpayer €1.3bn in 2009, and another €2.4m next year, through the pension levy, a ban on recruitment, and a pay freeze.
“It is wrong to say that public servants have contributed nothing, or that they are unwilling to contribute more to resolving an economic and budgetary crisis they did not create,” she said.
