Robin Evans, chief executive of the Canal & River Trust, was interviewed in the December 2012 issue of Waterways World. CART, a charitable trust, has taken over from British Waterways in England and Wales, but not in Scotland.
Robin Evans pointed out in the interview that, whereas waterways in Scotland get 98% of their funding from the state, CART’s English and Welsh waterways get only 35%. Amongst other things, CART is seeking donations and getting people to volunteer as lockkeepers and in other roles.
I’ll bet the Irish government is looking on with interest.
Irish waterways history 
The C&RT certainly needs funding from *somewhere*, not least to pay Robin Evan’s salary, which I gather is about a quarter of a million quid a year (including bonuses). His fellow directors are also earning similar amounts.
I must say I don’t object to having senior management paid properly. bjg
If they are managing a private sector company and their salaries reflect its performance, then fair enough. If instead they were simply appointed to run a public sector quango with no meaningful link between their performance and their achievements (rather the reverse, if the annals of http://www.narrowboatworld.com are to be believed), then I’m rather less impressed that the tax payer gave them more money than the prime minister every year. Hiving the whole lot off to the “third sector” as they’ve just done does little but remove any public accountability. Might have been more ethical to give the canals back to the people the government confiscated them from in 1948 with that compulsory purchase order…
How shall I put this tactfully? It seems that some folk who write about inland waterways affairs, especially from the perspective of customers, are incapable of distinguishing the important from the unimportant, into which latter category their own complaints often fall. That incapability goes some way to explaining why the complainants are not earning large salaries managing the waterways.
The other factor you neglect is the market rate for competent managers.
bjg
Many canal enthusiasts are hopelessly aspergic loons, yes. I know if the UK government handed me the running of the canals and a quarter of a million every year to make it up to me, I wouldn’t be complaining. But I never seem to get offered such posts. /sighs/
Let’s form a union …. bjg
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