Sara Morrison vs Belfast Film Festival - Thread 2

[TwoLoonsAndASprout]

Continuation of previous thread - don’t have all the details to hand to add here, so if someone can pop them on, pls do! Want to get this up quickly!

😳 What is this? Off to Google...

Well.

OMG at today's events! If anyone had told me a couple of years ago that I would be on the edge of my seat reading transcripts of employment tribunals I would have given them this face -->

Most of the old NI Exec web pages have been archived, so it's hard to track down details of appointments etc. The official announcements would give biographical details, but Invest NI is not a Mickey Mouse organisation.

What I do know is that the tribunals have many fewer panel members than they used to have - dozens rather than a few hundred. That's why they're recruiting for lay members now.

Generally employers reps will be HR specialists, the same as employee members are usually union officials, but since they're appointed until retirement, there will be some veterans whose original qualifications are lost to the mists of time, but they've been grandfathered in and can keep on going as long as they do a competent job as panel members. Nobody's going to ask "did Joanna embellish her CV when she was appointed in 1998" if she's been performing well since then.

As for how panels are allocated to cases, they'll generally just be contacted, asked if they're available on given dates, given a list of the parties and asked if they have any conflicts that would prevent them hearing that case.

I hadn't heard of the ash for cash scandal. So many interesting things to read about!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_Heat_Incentive_scandal

If anyone wants to do a deep dive into the cash for ash scandal, I can recommend Burned by Sam McBride, who does a cracking job of writing an entertaining book about bad governance.

It was a strange read for me, because it's full of people I know.

I would like to know about Waste Management and Environmental Consultancy. What did this business do. How much money did it make. How many people did it employ. What contracts did it have. Where are the tangible outputs.

It may be that she ran a hugely successful business and fully deserved the board and panel roles that came from her hard work and industry connections.

It’s just that I have seen too many people set up shell companies with impressive sounding names to create a CV for themselves so they can get onto cushy board and NGO roles. Environment consultancy companies are high on my list of bullshit businesses.

Invest NI appears to have allowed its board members to make payments that might, perhaps, have surprised some commentators.. Deborah Boyd's name crops up in a modest way towards the bottom of the list.
She stepped down from Invest NI in 2008, it seems.

I am thinking that DB is a exemplary case of the power of networking.

Looks like they get around £500 a day from my looking into it. Not a bad earner...

Happy to be corrected.

Nobody's going to ask "did Joanna embellish her CV when she was appointed in 1998" if she's been performing well since then

I guess this is what we're (some of us) are wondering. If you get in at some point and then don't draw attention to yourself and do an ok job, so actual create a cycle of affirmation/proof and legitimacy, at what point does the original lack of credentials matter?

Iirc, there have been a few NHS cases of 'clinicians' working at senior levels for years before being rumbled on some minor admin task or slip up. And then it being found that thier original training was prematurely halted or not passed etc. (And in those situations the years of doing ok by patients does not in any way excuse the fraud and lies told)

I very agree with this!

Stephen Kingon's name came up somewhere as part of this tribunal. I remember because I thought it was like Stephen King.

Actually I've just seen that the 2006-7 Annual Report and Accounts of Invest NI has a fuller list of DB's professional activities on Page 23.
It says she’s been an Employment Tribunal panel member for 'nearly 20 years'.
She isn’t described as 'Professor', however….though there is a Professor with academic credentials also on the board, plus a couple of 'Drs'.

Well, this is a peculiarity of lay members of employment tribunals. Technically they're a public appointment, but with most public appointments you get through the interview, the Minister chooses to appoint you, then you do your term and you might get a second term if you do a good job.

With tribunal panel members, once you get appointed you're there until you reach 75, die or resign. There's a pro forma reappointment every few years, but the handful of civil servants who cover this stuff don't have the resources to go back 20 years or more and check the initial credentials of the appointee.

I don't know how GB employment tribunals work, but I imagine it's basically the same setup.

Interesting that of the 10 companies that she has been involved in 8 were dissolved/liquidated only 2 are still running and she hasn't been involved in those 2 since 1999 and 2002 respectively.

Mind. Blown.

We are all mugs.

I'd forgotten Frank Bunting was on the board! I used to know Frank slightly, and knew people who knew him well. It's a small wee world.

That doesn't make sense on the dates vs number of years on ET panels.

Maybe so.

Her company had plans for a treatment facility in Galvone in Limerick - there is a recycling centre there now, but it does not have the Mechanical Heat Treatment system that Re3 proposed, it's just a recycling centre.
Waste facility to create 50 jobs

This may be proof that DB&Co were spoofing.

It's also likely that it didn't get planning permission, as MHT technology which was once hailed as environmentally friendly, later became very unpopular with environmentalists. The proposed site at Galvone was picketed by local people.

Maybe her company was a 'one trick pony' and when MHT went out of fashion, it went out of business...

I'll be interested to see if any facts about DB emerge, she may be all the things other posters suspect her of being, and she may not.

I'm going to stop going on about her now

There have been lots of things that were fashionable in the environmental space and are no longer.

It was once fashionable to believe that we should incentivise woodchip boilers, and there was definitely no way the honest people of the NI poultry industry would use a faulty scheme to claim enormous sums of money for heating their toasty barns 😉

I can't stop laughing. It's such a con.

TWS and Wilson are part of TWS group. 80% owened by DB. Little income, lots of liabilities, 4 employees one being Mr DB.

Would u like Ltd owned and run 50/50 by DB and Mr DB. Again little income, lots of liabilities.

Sets up companies, gives herself positions like CEO and networks like crazy. What a woman.

First appointed as a tribunal member in 1990, so that Invest NI blurb was not far off.

Public Bodies & Annual Report 2009-2010

Checked back over my notes, and the extra note from the journalist was when I was in the overflow room. Sound's not so good there, so I didn't copy down the actual wording.

On Wednesday I was too far back in the room to hear panel whispers, but if it was the pause during the discussion of rape crisis centres that seems to have been kicked off by an intervention from SD rather than coming out of the blue from the panel.

NC: p200 of bundle Tweets from Press & Politics NI calling for protests against LWS. Says women's rights orgs in NI overwhelmingly trans inclusive. Correct?

MD: Don't know.

NC: e.g rape crisis centres allow men.

MD: Don't know.

NC: What else might it mean? Can you explain what the sentence means?

MD: [repeats sentence from tweet] Self explanatory. What other explanation needed?

NC: Agree means they operate on the basis that TWAW?

MD: Imagine they may do. Not my area of expertise.

NC: So a rape crisis centre accepts a man who says he's a woman. Accept his word, allowed into space?

MD: Yes. [surprised tone]

NC: Women can legitimately object to that?

MD: Anyone can.

NC: So traumatised women ...

SD: [Objects] Well off track.

NC: It's about allowing women to speak. 'Most objectionable line' in speech was the need to keep men out of women's spaces.

J: Not sure why asking MD this.

NC: MD started an investigation on basis of complaints of transphobia. Need to explore the importance and legitimacy of C's statement.

[Brief panel consultation. Rise to discuss with panel]

J: List of issues needs to be stuck to. Will allow limited scope but rein in hypotheticals.

A woman in NI became a professor in the engineering sector at the age of 31 in 1990.

That's an almost miraculous achievement.

Just to say, massive thanks to @SionnachRuadh and other posters in NI for their invaluable local insight, we are so much the wiser for it.