Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Cormac McCarthy:
Well, I can't attest to the number but if you say that's the number, I take it as read. It would have been ... I mean there would have been .... IBEC would have done a lot of work on the industrial relations front, so we had a significant union presence, unionised staff cadre, so IBEC would have been the employer representative in negotiation around national wage agreements, things like that. So it's very difficult for an individual institution to do those things independently, so that's a simple case of ... IBEC would have been the employer's representative in doing negotiations around national wage agreements, etc., and so in engaging with our union, we believed it was helpful to be part of the employers' confederation so that we could make sure that we had, you know, a seat at the table when national agreements, etc., were being discussed. That's one simple example. There were other training courses that IBEC did, they did a lot of consulting work as well and so there was a raft of services they provided, but the one that occurs to me most is the industrial relations side.
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