THE CHIEF executive of the National Irish Safety Organisation (NISO) and three senior members of its executive have resigned with immediate effect.

Chief executive Pierce Martin, president George Brett, vice-president Jim Jeffers and honorary secretary Paul O'Sullivan blamed resistance on the key issue of reform of NISO's corporate governance structures for their decision to resign.

The NISO is a not-for-profit organisation providing training, information and advice on workplace safety. A poor corporate governance structure was identified in a 2005 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report that recommended a new strategy to develop the organisation. This required changes to be implemented to both the executive committee and the regional committee, the four men said in a joint statement.

"Despite a unanimous decision by the executive made on February 13th, 2008, to endorse a revised strategy and its implementation and despite our best efforts to make progress on these significant challenges and issues, we have been unable to implement this strategy.

"Therefore, despite considerable progress being made and our deep commitment to and our belief in NISO, we believe we have no other option but to resign," they said.

Mr Martin said the changes to the corporate governance structure were recommended by PWC to ensure proper management, avoid conflicts of interest, ensure committee members operate to the highest standards and to ensure that proper boundaries and understanding of responsibilities exist between the executive and regional committees and the chief executive.

With 20 members, he said the executive committee was too large by recognised best practice standards and there was a disproportionate weighting of regional interests on a national board that was hampering the work of the organisation.

Mr Martin was appointed in 2005 to implement the PWC recommendations.

In their statement, the four executives said progress had been made in a number of areas, addressing poor credit control, problems in relation to debt collection and IT technology but that the corporate governance issue remained a problem after 23 months.

"Change like that should take nine to 12 months, 18 months at the most," said Mr Martin. "We tried to address it but it now is becoming a stumbling block."

The NISO said it would not comment on the resignations.