Department to cut overtime and re-deploy 50 beef staff

HIT by an €85,000 overtime bill for one of their officials last year, the Department of Agriculture has introduced new duty rosters for inspection staff at air and sea ports.

“It is expected that these new arrangements will reduce the overtime bill considerably”, said a spokesman.

The new rosters are designed to maximise the use of existing resources and to limit the need for overtime; any overtime will have to be sanctioned by veterinary management in this new “flexible responsive inspection system”, introduced on September 8.

Heavy overtime costs were revealed in Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell’s Annual Report.

Meanwhile, the Department has re-iterated its intention to test three beef carcass classification machines in the second week of November.

From January 1, 2004, when machines or trained factory staff take over classification, the Department’s staff of 50 currently involved in classification will be withdrawn and deployed to other work. The Department will retain only an “active supervisory” role.

The plan to transfer responsibility for carcass grading from Department to factory staff has been described by farmers as “putting a fox minding chickens”.

Eddie Scanlan, a member of the IFA National Livestock Committee, told a meeting of Limerick IFA Executive it is not acceptable to farmers that factories employ their own graders, and IFA will insist independence is maintained in the system.

“We are prepared to consider the use of mechanical graders in the factories, if there is a suitable machine to do the job, but the Department simply cannot walk away from their responsibility for independence in grading”.