AIB sets up whistleblower system

AIB has engaged a British charity to provide safeguards for staff who want to disclose wrongdoing in the company while legislation to protect whistleblowers in Ireland has lain on the shelf for more than five years.

The Labour Party is to make a renewed attempt to force the enactment of the Whistleblowers Protection Bill, which it first introduced in 1999.

The Government did not oppose the bill at the time, but has sidelined it since.

AIB is subscribing to the British-based voluntary organisation, Public Concern at Work, after a series of overcharging scandals and the discovery the bank had broken foreign exchange regulations for eight years. The revelations came via insiders who went to the media.

The charity trains management to set up procedures for staff to raise matters internally without fear of reprisal but it also runs a confidential hotline employees can use to disclose information that is then passed on anonymously to the bank’s chairman.

AIB said the cost of implementing the policy, which it calls the “Speak Up” programme, throughout the bank’s 10,000 Irish staff and 14,000 employees in Britain and Poland, was “a few tens of thousands.”

The bank said the policy complied with legislation in Britain where the Public Interest Disclosure Act has been in place since 1998.

SIPTU, the country’s largest trade union, said similar legislation was badly needed but accused the Government of not being interested in halting bad behaviour by employers.

Regional secretary Mike Jennings said the union struggled to act on allegations of abuse because employees who alerted the union were afraid to get involved.

“It’s hugely frustrating.

“You are grateful to the person who made the phone call but you really wish they felt they were able to come out front and stand up to the employers.

“If there was a whistleblowers act, they would not be victimised.”

That view was backed by industrial relations expert Joe Wallace, head of the Department of Personnel and Employment Relations at the University of Limerick.

“We should have legislation, we should have it as soon as possible,” he said.

Pat Rabbitte introduced the 1999 bill and while it passed both stages of the Dáil, the Government said there was a danger of it becoming a “cranks charter” for disgruntled employees.

A spokeswoman for Enterprise Minister Micheál Martin said the bill was still on the Government’s legislative agenda. “There are a number of complex legal issues which arise and some of those require further reflection. The Minister is going to be doing that.”