Tax Payers Money Wasted on IBEC

national | worker & community struggles and protests | news report Sunday June 07, 2009 00:16 by Whistleblower

Disgust at the revelation that public sector bodies are WASTING TAX-PAYERS MONEY on membership of IBEC - this has got to be a scandal!

I work for a relatively small public sector organisation and yesterday some of my colleagues and I found out that our management pays over €15,000 (annually) of TAX-PAYERS MONEY assigned to the running of the organisation to none other than IBEC! To say that we, the employees, were aghast at this revelation is an understatement! Why, we wondered, would a public-sector body have funds to waste on the dreaded enemy of public services?! And not just any funds, but tax-payers hard earned funds, in a time when we're seeing cuts to health services, disability benefits, the unemployed, public transport and across the education sector!!

Apparently this is not unusual - many public service bodies claim allegiance to IBEC and pay considerable amounts of tax-payers' money to do so. I understand the amount paid is commensurate with the size of the organisation, so in some cases it's well in excess of the figure I mentioned. It'd be interesting to know if anyone out there, working for the HSE perhaps, might have access to similar information - I'd hazzard a guess that HSE boss Mary Harney would be only too happy to throw a fgood few quid in the direction of her cronies in IBEC!?

The excuse that our senior management offered for signing up - networking. Call me cynical but I'd imagine access to the IBEC industrial relations machine might have something to do with it. Senior managers within the public service should be absolutely ashamed of themselves with this disgusting waste of tax-payers money at a time when children go without decent education and health services!!