Eoin Reedy

Good morning, Ciara.

Nice to be with you.

Yeah, I mean, the Labour Employer Economic Forum meets usually about four times a year.

But with everything that went on in the last two weeks and with the illegal war in the Middle East and its consequences for everybody in the world, particularly in the Western world,

we engaged with government and said, look, it's timely that we have a discussion about this.

This was before the protests and the blockades.

And I think the protests and the blockades of the last kind of 10 days have just highlighted how important it is to engage.

Because, you know, long before Donald Trump's latest misadventure in the Middle East, many workers, not all, but many, many workers in this country have been struggling with the cost of living prices.

And it's only got worse.

But for us, I suppose the events of the last week or so have been a kind of a seismic shift whereby the government has demonstrated by their behavior.

And they're not responsible for the crisis Trump is, but they're responsible for the policy decisions they choose to address the crisis.

And I think the government's behavior last week essentially says might is right.

And I think they have taken industrial peace from trade unions for the last number of years, maybe a little bit too much for granted.

So we have a suite of policies that we want to address with government to address the cost of living for workers.

And we hope they'll engage with us on that if they, for whatever reason, choose not to and decide that, you know, we'll just engage with hospitality and the farmers and the hauliers who represent in total about 12 percent of the working population at most.

Well, then unions will have to resort to higher pay demands in the workplace across the public and private sector and crucially, the very heavily organised commercial semi-state sector, transport, aviation, energy, those areas.

Well, I give you an analogy.

If we had a strike, a legal strike, as we can do in Dublin Airport, for example.

in a particular company, I won't mention any companies, obviously, because I don't want anyone to think there's a pending strike anywhere in Dublin Airport at the moment, and there isn't.

But if we did have a particular strike, a legal strike in Dublin Airport, having served the required notice, imagine if the workers involved decided they were going to block access to the airport, block the roundabout on the M50, block the M1.