State workers paid €1.8m for remaining idle

A GROUP of former milk board employees, who remained work idle, were paid nearly €2 million by the Department of Agriculture over a seven-year period, it emerged yesterday.

The workers lost their jobs when the Dublin and Cork Milk Boards were sold to the private sector in 1992 and were promised they would be re-allocated to jobs in the public sector.

The Oireachtas Committee of Public Accounts, which scrutinises public spending, found some were not redeployed for up to seven years.

According to a committee report published yesterday, the total paid to 23 of the staff from the date of redundancy to their appointment to departmental posts or their retirement was €1.8m.

Committee chairman Michael Noonan warned it was vital the department learned lessons from the experience because it would soon have to re-allocate 400 surplus staff.

“We’re saying redeploy the staff immediately to useful functions and don’t have them hanging around like the staff that were made redundant from the milk board.”

These have become surplus to requirements since the EU’s Single Farm payment regime cut the number of cheques and forms being sent out to farmers.

The sale of the milk boards, which had been set up in the 1930s to provide a guaranteed milk supply to Dublin and Cork, cost the State a further €2.2m in redundancy payments.

This was because the new owners paid only statutory redundancy to the 50 workers being laid off and the State had to make up the difference.

The committee report also looked at the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (C&AG) investigations into the farm advisory body Teagasc in 2003.

It found a staff member had made false travel claims worth over €77,000 and no action had been taken by management.

The staff member has since been ordered to repay the full amount, plus interest of €52,420, and has been reduced in grade and salary.

At another Teagasc centre, the C&AG uncovered a conflict of interest case. A €336,000 contract to provide computerised farm data was given to a company which was 50% owned by a Teagasc employee.

The State body also failed to properly record the value of property it sold off and was found to have made a surplus of e3m at a time when it was making staff redundant.