pluginManagement not inherited

I've noticed that with m2eclipse (and I saw the same previously when using q4e) that the pluginManagement section of the uppermost parent is not inherited to child modules.

So in a child module I have:
<build>
<plugins>
<artifactId>foo</artifactId>
<groupId>bar</groupId>
</plugins>
</build>

and in the uppermost parent I have the version and various other things specified in the pluginManagement.

Building from the command line works no problems. But in eclipse it has all sorts of errors as it's not honouring the version (and possibly other configs) defined in the pluginManagement that ought to have been inherited... and is instead is trying to download :RELEASE.