An open letter to Ben Kearney ATGWU

Dear Ben

As someone who for many years regarded you as a friend and colleague I feel compelled to write to you to express my view of the role you played in the disgraceful treatment of someone who heretofore would have regarded you as a friend and a colleague also.

There is strong evidence to suggest that you played a significant role in planning the ousting of Mick O Reilly and Eugene Mc Glone despite the fact that initially you went on national television calling for their reinstatement, saying that the members were "outraged" by what had happened.

Since then I understand that you postponed your retirement, accepted a new improved contract of employment and took over Eugene Mc Glones job. You even went as far as removing his name from the office door, despite the fact that charges had not even been preferred against him at that time. Apparently you did something similar in the case of Mick O Reilly. I don't need to tell you that there is a name in common usage for people who do other peoples work while there is a dispute in progress.

I was amused to read in today's newspapers that you "reacted angrily" to the suggestion that union funds might be used to fund legal action on behalf of these two senior and longstanding members. I notice that you did not react angrily to the expenditure of £500,000 stg to date by the General Secretary, Bill Morris in his personal vendetta against O Reilly and Mc Glone.

By your actions you are complicit in the shafting of two exceptional trade unionists, the reaction to which could lead to the ultimate destruction of the ATGWU. It has also become clearer that the dismissal of O Reilly and Mc Glown was part of a wider agenda which would, in effect, mean the ending of the independent and radical role the ATGWU has traditionally played and in particular by critically analysing what passes for "partnership" in Ireland today.

It is not insignificant that co-incidental with these contrived sacking, plans for the future of the Irish operation were designed in London, without any consultation with the Irish membership. The plan aims to radically reduce the number of industrial officers in Ireland thereby reducing service to the members. The plan also envisages the closure of about half of the union offices in Ireland both north and south.

The bureaucrats in London would know that neither Mick nor Eugene would have stood idly by and allowed this to happen, hence the need to remove them on whatever spurious grounds. There again at the rate the ATGWU is loosing members, perhaps these reductions may soon be justified.

Almost overnight the ATGWU has gone from being the leading independent and radical trade union in the country to becoming the most reactionary and backward.

To my knowledge not even the notorious Ryanair boss Michael O Leary nor any employers body has ever treated a long serving and highly respected member of staff in such an appalling and dismissive manner.

By accepting the notion of "precautionary suspension" in a case, which everyone now knows, was blatantly contrived, the ATGWU has placed all it's members and particularly its shop stewards and union activists in imminent danger. What exactly can the union say or do if an employer decides to use" precautionary suspension" against a shop steward or activist? Will the union say as you have said publicly in this case that the union is bigger than any one individual. (Except of course Bill Morris) The message would appear to be if you get in trouble you are on your own. So much then for trade union solidarity.

Bill Morris's obsession with getting rid of O Reilly and Mc Glone (supported no doubt by some of the "brothers" from here) the ATGWU might well have put others at risk. And far from protecting and securing the unions future you might instead contributed to its terminal decline. After all who would want to be represented by a union with such low standards as to knowingly allow such a blatant miscarriage of justice to be perpetrated on their colleagues, some who even secretly supporting it.

Finally, I hear through the grapevine that some people within the trade union movement are worried about the prospect of the emergence of a new trade union known as the "Independent Workers Union" Apparently this is because it stands for the kind of radical policies and internal democracy once associated with the ATGWU. I would not be at all surprised if the IWU were now to fill the void created by the demise of the ATGWU.


Yours sincerely



Paul Kinsella