Finance Committee Meeting; Executive Committee Meeting

Yesterday evening we had scheduled meetings of the Finance Committee and Executive Committee.

For the first time in my time at Engineers Ireland,  John Power missed much of the two meetings.  He was being interviewed live by George Hook for Newstalk 106 about our mathematics and science education report.

Murt Coleman joined us for the first time as a new member of the Finance Committee.   The Finance meeting was fairly short,  because it is the start of the financial year and thus we had operational figures only for January.  We're off to a reasonable start,   and our subscription income will obviously require careful monitoring as the year progresses.   We are also about to launch a new Members benefit scheme which I previously reported here.

The Executive meeting followed.

Preparations for the annual conference in April are well under way,  and several keynote speakers have been confirmed.  We are awaiting confirmation of one or two more,  and hope to be able to launch the conference website next week.

We had a lengthy presentation led by John Butler and Sean Mehigan (independent consultant) of work in progress to assess our entire Continued Professional Development (CPD) strategy and business.  Members of Executive will provide further feedback on the assessment over the next couple of weeks,  and John Power hopes to be able to bring a fully considered proposal for improving our CPD business at the March meeting of the Executive.

Jim Robinson has volunteered to bring a position paper on the 30km/hr speed limits for certain cities for consideration.   We also discussed proposals for recognising and rewarding high achievers amongst engineering students.