Bankers should defer bonuses - union

BANK EXECUTIVES should consider deferring bonus payments until a time when lenders are in better financial position, the general secretary of the Irish Bank Officials’ Association has said.

Larry Broderick said bonuses generated a bad culture in banking and should not be part and parcel of future pay structures.

“The reality is that the bonus culture, not only in Irish banking but right across the world, is one of the reasons we are in the financial and economic mess,” he said.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Mr Broderick said if the economy was to be sorted out, people needed to look at the broader picture and not think selfishly about such payments.

Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan announced that 90 per cent of bonuses paid to bankers would be recouped by the exchequer in tax after it emerged AIB staff would share tens of millions in bonuses for 2008.

The bank’s executive chairman, David Hodgkinson, has said the payments reflected AIB’s past and was “not the way we intend to conduct ourselves in future”.

Mr Lenihan said in a response to a parliamentary question that some 2,869 AIB employees were paid €58.65 million in deferred bonuses this year and last year.

Some €35.5 million was paid this year following legal action and a further €3.7 million was paid to staff in AIB Capital Markets in respect of deferred bonuses relating to work in 2006 and 2007. Some 62 executives shared €11.11 million, or an average of €179,000 each, for 2009, while 674 managers shared €30 million or an average of €44,000 each.

Charities yesterday called on AIB staff to donate their bonuses to them. St Joseph’s Centre for the Visually Impaired said recipients should donate some or all of their money to charities who “represent those have been robbed of funding by this Government”.

It said corporate donations had dried up during the recession and that “this Christmas we are relying on the kindness of bankers to make the difference necessary to ensure future generations of blind children in this country can have a better quality of life”.

Enda Egan of the Carers Association said the recipients should show Christmas spirit and donate half of the payments to make up for a €14 million reduction in the Budget allocation for carers.

Mr Broderick said most AIB staff did not receive bonuses and frontline workers were subjected to abuse from the public.