Action by agricultural officers may hit farmers
More than 600 technical agricultural officers at the department will start industrial action next Monday. Trade union Impact, which represents the staff, said the protest has been triggered by the department’s refusal to give its members a chance to compete for assistant principal posts.
It said that refusal “is in defiance of a new, civil service-wide policy that allows all qualified staff to apply for vacancies that have been approved for filling”.
The union said this was the latest in a series of management decisions that were putting agricultural officers’ job security at risk.
The duties of the staff at the centre of the dispute include inspections of farms, meat factories, dairy processors, marts, mills, laboratories and other facilities.
“Their role is central to food safety and compliance with EU and Irish regulations on the production, labelling, sale, and export certification of agricultural produce including live animals,” Impact said.
The union warned that, while the industrial action will initially be “mild” and cause “administrative inconvenience to management without impacting on farmers or the agriculture and food industry”, it will escalate if no resolution is found.
If the matter remains unresolved by late February or early March, Impact said farmers will start to see delays to grant payments and disruption to the export of cattle and other agricultural products.
Impact national secretary Eamonn Donnelly accused the Department of Agriculture of “effectively collapsing the industrial relations process at a time when agricultural officer duties are diminishing because of rationalisation and reforms.
“Meanwhile, management persists in transferring their duties to higher-paid civil servants and unnecessarily allocating inspection work to expensive external contractors.
“Both of these practices incur huge costs to taxpayers and the farming community while putting our members’ jobs at risk,” he said.
The union said departmental management has shelved an internal review, which shows costs of certain veterinary inspections could be more than halved by allocating work to agricultural officers.
It said another external review — commissioned by the department and published last August — outlined millions in potential savings that would accrue if agricultural officers were to undertake postmortem meat inspections currently done by expensive external contractors.
The report, by independent consultants Team BDS, found that this measure alone could deliver savings of €5.3m each year.
A spokeswoman for the department said reductions in public expenditure and public sector staff numbers had meant it, along with all the other Government departments, had been forced to adapt “business processes” significantly to maintain service delivery.
It said it would continue to work with Impact “within the appropriate industrial relations mechanisms with a view to resolving any outstanding issues”.
