Madam, – Martin Wall, Industry Correspondent, (Home News, November 9th), has hit on a very significant piece of information with regard to public money paid to employers’ body Ibec. The usual comment from Ibec and the business sector is, that as their earnings are entirely private and based on industrious endeavour, they are rightfully shielded from public scrutiny.
However, it would appear that considerable sums are directly paid to Ibec from State coffers and, given also the amount of indirect advantage to business in certain tax breaks and grants, it is not impertinent to subject Ibec to the same attention as the public sector and trade unions.
Much has been made of the tax relief on trade union subscriptions and the salaries of certain Ictu officials, but the union members pay their officials. A closer look at the funding and salaries of the Ibec bosses is now overdue. Note that Ibec refused to disclose the salaries of their officials recently while at the same time influencing the Government on the earnings of others.
Ibec had 4,223 members at the end of 2008 and members’ contributions were €9.54 million. Salaries and wages were €5.3 million and the accounts do not give number of staff.” (Colm Keena, Finance, October 31st). Considering Ibec’s interest in greater efficiencies in the public sector, lower wages for ordinary workers, their insistence on removing pension parity for public sector workers, and their abysmal failure to provide secure pensions for workers generally, it is not out of order to expect them to lead by example.
One last question worthy of asking: what are the pension arrangements for the top business magnates? How many of them have defined benefit pension provision for themselves while denying it to their own employees? Considering the politicians have entirely different arrangements for themselves, it is highly probable that the same “gap” will be evident between the “higher” and “lower” orders in the private sector, in fact, it is most likely the gap will be even greater than in the public sector. – Yours, etc,