Garda recruitment company breached British minimum wage law, staffed by unionists
The company contracted to manage garda staff recruitment was forced to pay almost €6 million to its workers after a British revenue investigation found it had breached minimum wage law.
An Garda Síochána awarded Staffline, whose Ireland-based senior management team was involved in founding a defunct unionist political party, a €4 million-a-year contract last year to manage the recruitment of its civilian and specialist staff.
A Garda Síochána (AGS) spokesperson, who wanted to correct “some highly inaccurate media and social media commentary” told The Ditch AGS “is not using Staffline for the recruitment of gardaí” but rather civilian staff.
The spokesperson added, “There is no risk with respect to the payment of minimum wage to staff working for An Garda Síochána”.
Its workers who hadn’t been paid the minimum wage for five years
Staffline will be responsible for recruiting civilian garda staff up to the grade of assistant secretary-general (equivalent) and for specialist roles in vetting, forensics and crime analysis, according to tender documents published last year.
The British revenue and customs service (HMRC) revealed earlier this year that Staffline Group Plc, which owns Staffline Ireland, topped a list of more than 500 companies that failed to pay the national minimum wage.
Staffline was forced to pay more than £5.1 million (€5.9 million) to 36,767 of its workers who hadn’t been paid the minimum wage from 2013 to 2018.
In 2013 Staffline Ireland CEO Tina McKenzie founded the short-lived NI21 political party with former Stormont MLA and Ulster Unionist Party politician Basil McCrea. Belfast-based McKenzie unsuccessfully ran for the party, which adopted a pro-union stance, at the 2014 European Parliament elections.
McKenzie was previously refused security clearance for a role with the north’s probation service because her father, Harry Fitzsimons, was a Provisional IRA bomber.
McKenzie, who recently received an MBE at Buckingham Palace, later passed high-level vetting for work as a consultant to the British Ministry of Defence, according to a 2013 interview.
McKenzie’s most immediate colleague at Staffline, head of projects Kirsty McClay, was also an NI21 party official and worked as co-founder Basil McCrea’s parliamentary assistant from 2013 to 2016.
A spokesperson for An Garda Síochána told The Ditch, “An Garda Síochána cannot reasonably exclude a tenderer from a tender process for a historical breach that has been remediated. Staffline took remedial actions in 2019 and formally concluded the matter with HMRC in 2020. An Garda Síochána's tender process was completed in 2023 close to five years after Staffline remediated the breaches.
“An Garda Síochána is not using Staffline to provide agency staff so there is no risk with respect to the payment of minimum wage to staff working for An Garda Síochána. Contrary to some highly inaccurate media and social media commentary, An Garda Síochána is not using Staffline for the recruitment of gardaí,” added the spokesperson.
Staffline declined to comment.