OK, one last attempt at spelling it out for the fantasists with selective amnesia, and also to help explain context to those outside of Ireland why this won't happen...
We have a constitution here - it allows workers to join a union, but (and this has been tested on more than one accasion in our supreme court) employers have a constitutional right not to recognise the union.
Over half of our manufacturing employees in Ireland work for foreign-owned industry, including a large list of US multinationals in the IT and pharma business - Ireland Inc has actively looked for this business over the last 30 years. The vast majority of these companies do not have or want any unions involved - that was the deal when they started up. Many of these jobs are under serious pressure currently as companies move on to other lower-wage economies, eg; Dell are within a whisker of shutting a very large manufacturing plant in Limerick.
Irish unions have lost significant ground as a result, to the extent that as of last year, only 35% of full-time and only 19% of part-timer workers are members of a union (numbers are relatively stable, but very few of the new jobs made add to the union count). To add to this, Ryanair as usual has taken full advantage and went out of its way to aggravate SIPTU/IALPA over the years. The government was pressured as a result to bring in new legislation which would allow collective bargaining (if not union recognition) by the back door in using our labour court - to a certain extent, Ryanair brought this on themselves. Despite an initial win in the high court by SIPTU/IALPA, this new legislation was blown out by the supreme court as they saw it as de facto union recognition. SIPTU/IALPA subsequently walked away from a court case without informing their members first, which, as others have pointed out, has led to mass disillusionment with the exception of a few die-hards who you frequently read on prune.
Cue the recent pay talks here, and our friends in SIPTU made it a "deal breaker" that there must be union recognition as part of the deal. Instead of doing something concrete which can't be done (we all know a nod is as good as a wink to a blind man), we now have clause 4 and clause 5. At the risk of boring you to death, 4 says:
The Government will enact legislation, in June of 2009, to enable the mechanisms which were established in the “2004 Act” to operate as originally intended prior to the Supreme Court decision in the Ryanair case. This will be preceded by a review process which will consider the legal and other steps involved. This will be concluded by the end of March 2009.
Note the "review process", and the "consider the legal and other steps involved" - if that doesn't get your bull**** meter off the scale, check your pulse. Apart from that, trying to operate the 2004 act as originally intended means de facto collective bargaining (but NOT union recognition) by the back door, and we've already seen what the supreme court thinks of that. Clause 5 tries to make up for it by bringing in anti-victimisation legislation, it's about all they can do to put some manners on Ryanair.
So, we have pilots in Ryanair who were led up the garden path by IALPA, who themselves were led up the Swanee by a bunch of lawyers, who choose to interpret this as meaning that Ryanair will have to recognise IALPA sometime in 2009. Plus, we have SIPTU and other unions who are desperate to get more membership using the "result" of the recent pay talks to go on a recruitment drive, in an economy already in recession that now depends hugely on non-unionised foreign investment.
Up the workers, indeed.