Conditions of IBRC staff outside State unchanged

About 200 IBRC staff outside the Republic are still employed by the organisation despite last week’s liquidation.

According to trade union, the Irish Bank Officials’ Association (IBOA), while 800 IBRC staff in the Republic lost their jobs last week, the terms and conditions of IBRC employees outside the State have not changed because the legislation that began its liquidation only applies in this jurisdiction

That means staff in Britain and Northern Ireland are entitled to a generous voluntary redundancy scheme that is no longer available to their colleagues here.

An IBOA spokesman said that about 200 staff were still employed by the bank outside the State and continued to enjoy statutory protections such as minimum notice that no longer applied to their 800 colleagues in the Republic.

He said a voluntary redundancy scheme offering twice the statutory payment is still open to the 200 staff in the North and Britain, but not to those in the Republic, who effectively lost their jobs at the IBRC last week.

Special liquidators

The statutory minimum is two weeks pay for each year of service. The special liquidators, Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson, have rehired most IBRC workers, but on monthly rolling contracts.

At a meeting yesterday, Mr Wallace told IBOA general secretary Larry Broderick and a number of union officials that he could not offer anything more than statutory redundancy to the workers.

While the terms Mr Wallace has offered to the IBRC staff he rehired are the same as those that applied when the bank employed them, any issues relating to redundancy are outside his control.

“There are anomalies there,” the IBOA’s spokesman said afterwards, referring to the different situations of staff in the Republic and those in the North and Britain.

He said the union would be seeking a meeting with Minister for Finance Michael Noonan later this week, in an effort to get him to address these issues. He added that there was a precedent for offering more than the minimum statutory payment to staff of a State company in liquidation.

Extra payment

The spokesman pointed out that when Irish Fertiliser Industries was wound up in the 1990s, workers there received an additional payment on top of the statutory requirement.

The extra payment was for co-operating with the winding-up process, the spokesman said. “We would argue that this is a similar situation.”

In a statement, Mr Broderick described the meeting with the liquidator as constructive.