Pay rises create appalling vista, says LRC chief

PAY increases at Anglo Irish Bank create an appalling vista and difficulty in the context of the negotiations the Labour Relations Commission is involved in, according to LRC chief executive Kieran Mulvey.

Speaking at the Public Affairs Ireland Conference in Dublin he said nobody accepts or understands the rationale.

He said pay increases are few and far between at the moment, and in the past year he has only been involved with three areas where increases have been awarded.

Earlier Taoiseach Brian Cowen said it was “very unfair” to criticise management of the state-owed Anglo Irish Bank who awarded pay increases to staff despite predicted losses of €14 billion last year.

Mr Cowen told the Dáil it would be a “recipe for chaos” if the Government overruled a decision made by the board of the bank, which is funded by Irish taxpayers.

“These things don’t come up for sanction by the Government,” he said, following controversy over the awarding of pay rises to 70 staff members.

Labour said Anglo was a “zombie bank” and asked the Government if it could justify giving a pay rise in an organisation that is expected to report losses of €14bn in the past 15 months.

“We are told it’s going to be the highest ever reported losses by an Irish company,” said party leader Eamon Gilmore.

During Leaders’ Questions, he said Anglo “is the rotten apple at the heart of what happened in the Irish banking system that has given rise to the collapse in our economy for which people up and down this country have been paying for the past 18 months with their jobs, their pay packets, their living standards, the quality of the services that are being produced”.

Mr Gilmore said: “Sorry Taoiseach, this is not a matter for the management and board of the banks. This is a matter for the Government. You own it.”

Fine Gael’s Enda Kenny said the issue “goes to the very heart of the lack of fairness in this society” and “cannot be justified”.

“The Irish people have had enough; 800,000 people between the public and private sector have taken pay cuts, 200,000 have lost their jobs.”

Following criticism from the opposition that the board, rather than the Government, has responsibility for the pay rises, Mr Cowen said: “That’s very unfair to both the new management that are in there and the new board who are acting on behalf of the Government and taxpayer to ensure that we seek to protect to the greatest extent possible the interests of the taxpayer in respect of how this bank is being downsized.”