ROYAL BANK of Scotland (RBS), the owner of Ulster Bank, is cutting 221 jobs from its technology services offices in Dublin and Belfast as part of the bank’s plans to cut 9,000 jobs worldwide.
The redundancies are in addition to the 1,000 job cuts at Ulster Bank announced last year due to reduced activity and the merging of First Active into the Irish bank.
RBS has informed 196 staff at the bank’s offices on Parkgate Street beside the Phoenix Park and 25 staff in Belfast that they are no longer required.
The bank, which is 84 per cent owned by the British government, announced plans last April to cut up to 9,000 jobs worldwide in areas such as technology and call centres over a two-year period.
RBS said some of the Irish jobs would move to locations where it has “key back-office hubs in the UK and elsewhere”.
Staff will be offered redundancy terms, the bank said and, “where possible, opportunities for redeployment”. The banks said it intended to “ensure that the number of compulsory redundancies is kept to a minimum”.
The Irish Bank Officials’ Association (IBOA) has called on RBS to review the decision and to engage with the union in looking to retain the highly skilled IT jobs. Larry Broderick, IBOA general secretary, said that the job cuts would, “to all intents and purposes, be compulsory” and the bank had received “substantial incentives to set up its operations in Ireland”.
“It is not acceptable that they can just walk away and abandon these highly skilled and committed staff who have performed to a consistently high level,” he said.
The bank has run a technology services unit at Parkgate Street in Dublin since January 2000.
The IBOA only secured trade union recognition for RBS staff at the Dublin offices last September.
