IWA has control

My partner and I had a joint membership of the IWA, and in fact were often involved with restoration work with the Waterway Recovery Group, but we were both concerned when the IWA took it upon itself to hijack those elections of members to the CaRT council, writes Audrey Manning.

However they were worth a chance, but it came about that we were having problems at our CaRT moorings, so wrote jointly to these, our representatives, but did not even get the courtesy of a reply.

Had control

It was then it dawned on us that the IWA had got its members there so that it had control, and were no boating representatives at all, which was surely borne out to all when it joined up with CaRT.  So when membership time came around, I had pleasure in pointing out that we did not want to be part of an association that used such underhand methods to—and look at it as you will there is no other reason—to have complete control over the boaters supposedly representing us at CaRT.  So two more members down.

Reading what Mick Fitzgibbons wrote yesterday about his Freedom of Information request being thrown out when he asked what they had been doing for us rather shows that they are doing nothing for us at all.

In collusion

But CaRT itself must have been in collusion by not demanding that boaters standing for election must be free of all membership of any boating association and remain so. [Writer's italics.]  There are thousands of such boaters and anyway anyone interested in being elected would surely not mind giving up a membership.

Both my partner and I believe that Mick Fitzgibbons has hit the nail on the head when he says the IWA is yesterday's organisation, it seems to us it is nothing but power-mad.