Trade Unions To Consider Strike Action Over Public Services Cuts

Trade unions in Northern Ireland are to hold a series of public meetings to consider industrial action over cuts to public services.

The Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions held a meeting on Monday to call on the trade union movement "to engage with its membership and wider communities" ahead of ballots on industrial action, up to and including strike action.

"Northern Ireland is facing cuts to jobs and services which this society simply cannot bear," ICTU Assistant General Secretary, Peter Bunting said.

"The dam has burst after years of pressure from Westminster."

Mr Bunting said that since 2010, a total of £3.6 billion had been removed from the block grant, and that following years of "whittling away" at public services, there is now nothing else to cut "without doing permanent damage to our social fabric."

Mr Bunting said: "At the urging of the ICTU's affiliated trade unions and their 215,000 members, the leadership of the trade union movement is determined to make an effective and collective response to stop these cuts.

"To that end, a series of public meetings will be hosted by local Trades Councils in all of the major towns and cities across Northern Ireland from the beginning of 2015, at which trade unionists and locally-based campaigns will work together as part of a long-term strategy against all of the cuts proposed in the Draft Budget 2015/16 and the further cuts threatened for the rest of the decade by the Tories in Westminster.

"We also demand that local politicians refuse to impose these draconian measures on the people of Northern Ireland, including welfare reform."

(MH/CD)