Readers like you keep news free for everyone.
More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.
For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away.
# Surplus to Requirements
Staff at Limerick IT being paid €72,000 to 'do nothing'
“That’s absolutely crackers isn’t it? I mean it’s just bananas.”
THE PUBLIC ACCOUNTS committee has heard that some staff at Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT) are earning salaries of up to €72,000, but they have no work to do.
The news emerged while PAC was discussing the financial accounts of a number of third-level institutions.
The Comptroller and Auditor General Seamus McCarthy told committee members staff who earn a combined total of €216,000 a year technically have nothing to do. The employees were transferred to LIT after it merged with a rural business college in Co Tipperary in 2011.
McCarthy said these people are above “an approved level of staffing”, adding: “In this case, they actually have no work.”
To which independent TD Shane Ross asked: “They’re doing nothing?”
McCarthy then said:
Well they’re obviously doing something but they have have no formal assignment in the institute.
Fine Gael TD Patrick O’Donovan probed further, asking: “So people have had no jobs since 2011 at 72,000 a year and no one has done anything about it?”
Before Ross added: “That’s absolutely crackers isn’t it? I mean it’s just bananas.”
“It does happen where organisations are amalgamated that people become surplus to requirements,” McCarthy stated.
Read: Taxpayers could end up footing €4.1m bill for student grant overpayment
Read: €96m could have been overspent in dole payments
