Irish Unions Move Their Strike to 12 November, the Day Leaders Meet in Dublin

Irish public sector unions have set their 24-hour strike for Thursday 12 November, a day later than the date they had been preparing, and the same day about 50 European leaders are due at the Convention Centre in Dublin. The government calls the clash an embarrassment in the middle of Ireland's EU presidency. Kevin Callinan, who chairs the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, says the date was moved for logistics, not to overshadow the summit.

On Monday the committee met to weigh a stoppage that had been pencilled in for Wednesday 11 November, after ten days of talks at the Workplace Relations Commission ended on Friday night with no credible offer, in the unions' words. The new plan is a march and rally in Dublin and smaller rallies in other centres, then a harder work-to-rule than the one already running. Teachers, nurses, civil servants and the wider public service are in the frame. A garda work-to-rule will be running over the same days.

Why Callinan says it is not about the cameras

"This was more driven by logistical considerations and the fact that previously we had a strike on a Wednesday, and it was felt that we should vary it for various reasons," Callinan said. He said operational teams in each union would spend the next day fitting the action together. He denied that the strike had been moved to coincide with the European Political Community meeting.

The denial will be tested against the diary. The EPC gathering is the largest event of the presidency. An informal meeting of EU leaders follows on Friday 13 November. Jack Chambers, the minister for public expenditure, said the action would "cause significant disruption to critical services that the public rely on while this industrial relations process remains ongoing." Disruption on an ordinary Thursday is one argument. Disruption while motorcades are trying to reach a summit is another, and it is the one Dublin will be asked about in every European capital that is sending a leader.

What Foley is being asked to do today

The independent group chaired by Kevin Foley, chair of the Workplace Relations Commission, was set up to build the frame of the pay talks. On Tuesday it meets union representatives and government representatives separately, looking for a way through the impasse declared on Friday. That was the request the WRC made when the formal sessions stopped. A separate meeting is not a new offer. It is a chance to see whether either side will put a number on the table that the other can take back to a mandate.

The unions' case is unchanged: there is still no credible pay offer, and the work-to-rule already in place has not moved the government. The government's case is that talks were still a process, and that a national stoppage during a presidency summit punishes patients, pupils and passengers for a negotiation that has not finished. Both can be true for a week. They cannot both survive 12 November without a cost.

What a deal would have to beat

Any proposal Foley carries from one room to the other has to be something a union committee can put to members and a minister can defend in the Dail in the same news cycle as a European summit. That is a narrower gap than it was on Friday, when the only audience was the talks themselves. If today's meetings produce nothing that can be written down, the strike date is the story of Ireland's presidency week. If they produce a figure, the date is a lever, and levers can be put back in the box.

British readers watching the Abu Dhabi window and the Commonwealth summit should not treat this as a side dispute. Ireland is chairing the room in which European leaders will sit nine days from now. A public sector standstill, and a police work-to-rule, is now part of the security and transport plan for that room. The pay row has become a foreign policy fact.