Senior Department of the Environment officials considered claims that the then chief executive of Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) was being blackmailed by a senator to be very serious, an employment tribunal has heard.
Denis Maher, who was head of the division in the department that oversaw IFI for 13 years until he retired in 2024, told the Workplace Relations Commission he agreed that Francis O’Donnell should bring his concerns to gardaí.
Maher said a senior colleague had told him he was contacted by the senator and that O’Donnell had been in touch with him and his colleague about the senator.
“He felt he was being blackmailed by this person,” he said.
The tribunal has directed that people not giving evidence in the case should not be identified.
Maher said he had discussions with his colleague and they believed the issues were very serious, as blackmail was an offence. However, he said it not was something the department could look into.
When O’Donnell indicated that he planned to go to gardaí, Maher said he and his colleague “absolutely concurred”.
At a previous hearing in the case, O’Donnell said he told gardaí he was being blackmailed by a senator. He said he was pressured to reinstate an IFI employee who had been suspended pending an investigation. He said he told gardaí that “significant fraud had occurred at IFI”.
He said the department later received a protected disclosure making allegations against him (O’Donnell).
The former chief executive said in his earlier evidence that he was informed by a senior department official that a senator had called him to say if the individual concerned was not reinstated, details in the protected disclosure would be made public.
Maher, who was giving evidence on behalf of O’Donnell on Thursday, said the department was concerned about leaks from the IFI board.
He said it was “particularly perturbing” that contents of a protected disclosure making allegations against O’Donnell, which the department understood was not to be shared on foot of legal advice, had been brought by a board member to a meeting in the agency in December 2022.
He said that night, under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, details were read out in the Dáil by a TD.
Maher said earlier, in May 2022, a senator “resurrected” a number issues that had been settled the previous year in IFI’s statement of internal controls, and made allegations against O’Donnell. He said some of the issues raised by the senator were “blatantly false” and some of the information could only have come from inside the board.
Maher said the then minister for the environment, Eamon Ryan, appointed a senior counsel to examine governance issues in IFI in the summer of 2022. He said the report found these to be “sub optimal” and recommended significant changes. He said the board had agreed to implement these in full but this was “not followed through”.
Maher said Ryan became “extremely dissatisfied” and decided to dismiss the board on a no-fault basis.
O’Donnell is claiming that he was unfairly dismissed by IFI and penalised after making protected disclosures under whistleblower legislation. He has claimed he was entitled to return to his substantive post as a regional director in IFI, but this is disputed by the agency.
Maher maintained IFI had delegated sanction from the Departments of Environment and Public Expenditure to recruit, promote and appoint up to and including principal officer level.
He said IFI would not have needed to get any further authorisation to appoint O’Donnell to his former post of regional director as this was classified as a grade below principal officer level.
The hearing continues.