A builder who was fired after calling his employer a “sneaky rat” in a row on site has won €9,000 for unfair dismissal.
David Donohoe secured the award under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 on foot of a complaint against SJK Civils Ltd, where he had worked for 13 years until he was sacked in April 2024.
Mr Donohoe told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) at a hearing in January that he was sacked on the spot from the €50,000-a-year job when he got into a dispute with his employer about working hours on April 5th last year.
He said he was told to start work at 5.30am that day, an hour and a half earlier than his usual 7am. He was told to go to Dublin to collect building materials and bring them to a site, he said.
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When he arrived with the material, he said, he was told he was expected to work until his usual finishing time of 3pm, despite the early start.
He declined to do so, after which his employer “started giving out”, he said.
“I called him a sneaky rat, that he had it all planned,” Mr Donohoe said in his evidence.
“He lost it again and said: ‘Go home and don’t come back in Monday’, so I tipped up the material and went home,” Mr Donohoe said.
The company’s director, who was not identified in the decision, maintained that Mr Donohoe was sent away from the site on April 5th, 2024, but was not dismissed from his employment until April 19th.
The director said Mr Donohoe wrote to him looking for a letter for the social welfare office to say he “was sacked or whatever”. The director then tried to arrange a meeting and called him to a “capability hearing”.
When Mr Donohoe did not show, the director wrote to him again and told him his failure to attend the meeting was “failure to follow a reasonable management instruction” and that his job was being terminated for “gross misconduct” during the April 5th incident.
Mr Donohoe’s solicitor, Frank Taaffe, argued the letters sent by the firm to his client were only “seeking to mend the respondent’s hand” by “retrospectively applying a dismissal process after the fact of dismissal”.
Adjudication officer Anne McElduff wrote that both parties “contributed to the escalation of matters to the point of dismissal” on April 5th and that it was “regrettable” there was no attempt to enter into dialogue after that.
Ms McElduff’s view was that Mr Donohoe should have engaged when there were attempts to launch a formal process.
However, she said the company failed to refer him to the correct company policy and set an “unreasonably short and unfair” deadline to either attend a hearing or have non-attendance be added to the charges against him.
The only option for appeal was to the company director, who had been directly involved with the April 5th incident, she added.
The respondent company did not discharge the burden of demonstrating Mr Donohoe’s dismissal was ”fair, reasonable or proportionate, or that the process was conducted in accordance with fair procedures", she wrote.
Mr Donohoe had claimed losses of €15,977 between April and August 2024, at which point he went into business for himself, the adjudicator noted.
Ms McElduff decided €9,000 was “just and equitable in all the circumstances”. She directed SJK Civils to pay Mr Donohoe that sum.
