A production company boss has told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) that he was advised not to reveal what he now says was the real reason for dismissing a pregnant producer.
Marc Dillion, co-founder of Nomos Productions Limited, said the company feared that a senior colleague would quit rather than continue working with Emma Rooney, who was just weeks from going on maternity leave at the time.
Ms Rooney, who was eight months pregnant and claims Nomos Productions Ltd had promised to pay her during her maternity leave, said she knew nothing of the complaints about her until she saw the company’s legal submissions on the day before her WRC discrimination case opened.
The firm denies Ms Rooney’s claim of gender-based discrimination under the Employment Equality Act 1997 over her dismissal while on probation in March of last year.
“I was told we should call her to a meeting and say this was performance-related but don’t say anything else. I would rather we could have gone into everything, but that was just not the advice we were given,” Mr Dillon said.
Amy O’Connor, Nomos’ head of client services, said she had a number of issues with Ms Rooney, including that the complainant “undermined” her in front of the company directors by highlighting matters on conference calls, even after she asked her not to.
“I said: ‘Do I see a future in Nomos for myself? Yes. Do I see a future for the both of us?’ I said: ‘Probably not’,” Ms O’Connor said.
“I had picked up things. Her personality type is quite matter-of-fact, quite direct, not what I’d call a ‘bubbly’ personality,” Mr Dillon said of Ms Rooney, later adding: “I could see if we left things where we were, Amy was going to be gone. She looks after 80-90 per cent of our business.”
Ms Rooney said she did not “recall having this fraught relationship with Amy”. She said she knew her colleague had some difficulties with her proposals on working arrangements but that “like any job, there’s a learning process”.
“I was completely blindsided in a meeting where up to that point there had been nothing but positive feedback,” Ms Rooney said. “I asked Mark during the termination meetings if there’d ever been a complaint made, and he said there hadn’t.”
Ms Rooney said the firm waived its two-year service requirement for maternity pay “to sweeten the deal” in salary talks because the €67,000 on offer did not match what she was looking for, a characterisation disputed by the employer.
She also said the directors had made an offer of a €20,000 payment to her upon her termination, which she said she turned down on legal advice.
Mr Dillon said he and his co-founder, Robin Murray, felt “absolutely horrendous” and that he “wanted to keep to my word” on providing for Ms Rooney’s maternity leave.
“My client was eight months pregnant. She was on the eve, on the eve, of giving birth,” said Ms Rooney’s solicitor Barry Crushell.
He said the case law in the area required an employer to set out “substantive and significant” reasons for the termination of a pregnant employee in writing unless there were “exceptional circumstances”, which he said were not present in the dispute.
Mr Crushell added that Ms Rooney’s terms of employment included formal grievance and disciplinary procedures, none of which had ever been used, adding that her contract required a three-month probation review meeting when any such matters could have been raised, but that this never took place.
Siobhán McGowan, solicitor for the employer, said: “The fact of pregnancy itself is not sufficient to hold that it was a discriminatory dismissal. Something else is required.
“We have provided that something else. Whether or not it was due procedure is not part of the equality legislation. What I contend is that no discrimination occurred.”
Adjudicating officer Pat Brady closed the hearing to consider his decision, to be delivered in writing to the parties at a later date and published after that by the WRC.