Although a major international engineering federation, the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) has a relatively low profile in the United Kingdom. In this article the activities and structure of IFAC are reviewed and some suggestions offered as to why IFAC is not seen to be important here. The article suggests that IFAC can be of great benefit to our automatic control community, but, as in any totally voluntary organisation, one only gets out of IFAC what one puts into it!