ADRIAN KANE says staff at the Football Association of Ireland are frustrated after the organisation’s CEO, David Courell, did not attend a meeting over planned redundancies today.

The Services Divisional Organiser at SIPTU was speaking after both parties in the dispute convened today.

Staff had suspended any consideration of industrial action until after this meeting.

Representing FAI management at the meeting were Chief Operating Officer Christina Kenny and People and Culture Director Aoife Raferty.

“We put our demands to the management,” Kane said afterwards. “We’ve stated that we’re looking for a copy of the plan.

“We’re looking for a scale of what the voluntary redundancies are. We’re looking for direct negotiations with management, and we’ve also informed management that we will not accept compulsory redundancies.

“It was quite a frustrating meeting because we didn’t get answers to those questions that we posed.

“Management have looked for time and informed us that they will come back to us next week to respond to our demands.

“We will convene a general meeting of members then and decide what our next steps are.

“I cannot stress enough the need to organise more workers to ensure that we have a positive outcome to these negotiations.

“So we will be in contact with people once we have a response from management, and we’ll convene a general meeting and agree on what the next steps are.”