Report: Britain must stop funding Irish lighthouses

AN ANGLO-IRISH government report has criticised the running costs of Irish lighthouses and recommended Britain stop providing a multi-million euro subsidy towards the service.

The Atkins report said the Commissioner of Irish Lights (CIL) was costing the British exchequer €12.5m each year and this was not sustainable.

The report said the lighthouse infrastructure in the Republic should be cut adrift from Britain. This would end a pre-independence agreement which saw the British General Lighthouse Fund (GLF) retain control of our marine navigation systems.

It said the split should be completed by 2016 and to achieve this Transport Minister Noel Dempsey should commit an additional €15m-a-year grant for a slimmed-down CIL.

The switch would be phased in to allow our ailing economy absorb the costs.

However, the wide-ranging investigation on marine services said the negotiation process had already taken too long.

“Covering the costs of Irish Lights from the GLF administered principally in the UK has been one of the most intractable aspects of our assessment,” it said.

It called for the two governments to agree a sensible deadline despite the Irish recession. “Given the economic situation in Ireland and Ireland’s importance as a destination for UK trade, an overly rapid time scale may prove counterproductive at a macro-economic level, if trade with Ireland were to contract because of a deeper recession there.

“Nonetheless... six years [of talks] have produced no significant change, and therefore a definite ‘road map’ for the elimination of the GLF subsidy is required,” he said.

The report’s authors said the stakeholders from the shipping industry were keen to see costly Irish lighthouses removed from the British system.

And in the longer term Ireland would have to find alternative ways to plug the hole, it said.

It suggested Mr Dempsey should consider mechanisms including a general grant or a tax on tourists arriving on ferries.

But it said the best option may be to divert some revenues from the carbon levy.

The report also said costs for the CIL could be reduced by outsourcing staff on high wages. Its grades are linked to the Irish civil service scales and the authors said it would be cheaper to hire private operators in Britain.

This could be used for 24 coastal tradesmen and six lighthouse technicians, it said. The report said all staff grades had received significant pay rises, compared with their counterparts in England, Wales and Scotland, but there was little effort to benchmark their work.

“There appears, on the face of it, to have been less use of external benchmarking data and research, or comparison of CIL pay with that of Trinity House [England] or Northern Lighthouse Board [Scotland] in terms of burdens on the GLF,” it said.

And this was exacerbated by the affects of the euro-sterling exchange rate.

CIL chief executive Dr Stuart Ruttle said despite obvious difficulties there were many welcome recommendations in the Atkins report.

“Many of the recommendations in this report can be implemented quickly. Others will prove challenging and we will need to consult widely on some before deciding how to proceed.

“Nevertheless I welcome the Atkins report, which offers a blueprint for the future provision, management and funding,” he said.