“It’s the Government’s fault”: sapper firefighters climb stairs and protest with firecrackers at the Assembly of the Republic
The explosion of several firecrackers marked the beginning of the firefighter demonstration in front of Parliament this Wednesday, which at 12:25 pm brought together hundreds of protesters.
Some of the firefighters, in uniform, began to climb the steps of the Assembly of the Republic, in Lisbon, always accompanied by PSP agents, who tried to maintain a cordon to stop them.
The National Union of Firefighters Sapadores (SNBS) expects more than a thousand protesters, coming from all over the country, at the concentration in São Bento, which began at noon, to the sound of heavy metal and rock n’roll. “Fighting sappers” is the phrase written on the black t-shirts that many wear.
At 12:25 pm protesters continued to arrive, filling Rua de São Bento with orange and green smoke cans and firecrackers. At 12:30 pm they sang the national anthem, after shouting a single slogan: “Sapadores”.
Speaking to Lusa, the president of the National Union of Sapadores Firefighters, Ricardo Cunha, stated that more than a thousand firefighters are expected in the protest action: “Only from outside [de Lisboa] 600 come.”
Despite the police order to descend the steps of Parliament, firefighters continued to form and release rocket smoke. Shortly afterwards, the AR stairs were covered in black smoke, while in the street, closed to traffic, a crane on a truck lifted a coffin with a dead ‘firefighter’.
At 1pm, reinforcements from the PSP Special Police Unit arrived at the scene. At the bottom of the staircase, protesters set fire to several tires and burned a firefighters’ work suit, in addition to raising a coffin and observing a minute’s silence in honor of the operatives who died in the September fires.
Sappers protest on the stairs
TIAGO MIRANDA
Union holds Government responsible
“I know they are right about the protests, what motivated this was the Secretary of State having scheduled a meeting and, in the end, he said again that he had nothing to present. Any normal person should understand that we cannot be untruthful to firefighters… If they were already angry, the probability of this happening was very high. The culprit of all this ends up being the Government”, stated the president of the National Union of Firefighters.
Ricardo Cunha admitted, in statements to journalists, that the protest “went beyond what was legal” and confessed that he did not know what the repercussions might be for the firefighters, announcing that the union management will meet “to understand what went wrong ”.
Also at the scene, the parliamentary leader of the Bloco de Esquerda defended that the sappers “are full of reason”. “We understand your anger and indignation. Your demands are more than fair. The least the Government can do is treat them with dignity and it has not done so”, pointed out Fabian Figueiredo, speaking to journalists. “We are preparing a package that we will present in the coming days in the Assembly of the Republic. We hope that this problem will be resolved once and for all”, he added.
The parliamentary leader of the Liberal Initiative called for dialogue and stressed that the State “has to safeguard its primary functions”, such as security. “You cannot continue to spend millions in situations like TAP and Efacec and then leave the essential functions completely abandoned. This is proof that they have been abandoned for decades”, declared Mariana Leitão. The liberal also acknowledged that “some excesses were committed” in the protest.
Representative Alfredo Maia highlighted that “the PCP did not arrive at this debate today, it has already had initiatives for a long time”. The party “has already presented two diplomas that will be discussed from today to eight days in plenary: one relating to the recognition of the profession as one of special risk and hardship and the other relating to the review of the firefighter’s social status”, highlighted the communist.
Claims include “salary adjustments”
The sappers fight for regulation of working hours, retirement at age 50 and a specific evaluation regime, among other working conditions.
“Firefighters demand salary adjustments to compensate for the increase in inflation, as was attributed to other public service careers,” said the union’s president, Ricardo Cunha, quoted in a statement.
The leader recalled that “there was a commitment from the previous Government” to award compensation to firefighters “retroactively to January 2023, but, “to date, this has not happened”.
Ricardo Cunha considered that firefighter sappers will have “been left out of these salary adjustments, as they are a special career in the public service that has not been revised”.
The SNBS also calls for “career regulation, which includes risk, hardship and unhealthy conditions supplements, as well as permanent availability, as a percentage and apart from salary”. A working schedule is also required “at a national level that guarantees the operability and safety of firefighters and those who are rescued by them”.
“In Portugal, there are no more than three thousand firefighter firefighters [em 25 municípios] and (…) these measures will not be a burden on the State Budget, because we are talking about a possible annual expenditure of less than 10%, compared to what the Government allocated to the security forces”, he maintained.
