An Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe organisation wanted to improve its governance, having \u201ctraditionally\u201d been run by members of the force on secondment, he said.<\/p>\n
That December, when it held its Christmas party, Dodd said he discovered that \u201ca tab had been opened in the hotel bar where many of the attendees were staying\u201d.<\/p>\n
He did not consider this appropriate, and closed the tab, he told the tribunal. The following month, January 2023, he objected to an open bar at a retirement party, but was overruled when the Society\u2019s committee \u201cvoted to approve it anyway\u201d.<\/p>\n
After passing his probation that spring, Dodd said he started \u201craising concerns about the level of expenses\u201d being paid out by the society in connection with its various committee meetings. The number of meetings was going up and so was the cost of the expenses, and he was concerned that committee members were being paid \u201cflat rate and unvouched\u201d, he told the tribunal.<\/p>\n
He started pushing to cut the number of meetings generally, and for them to be held at the society\u2019s head office in Dublin to reduce the expenses paid to committee members from the capital, he said.<\/p>\n
In August that year, he told the tribunal, he tried to tell the society\u2019s committee that it had a legal obligation to do a revaluation of its assets. The society faced a bill of \u20ac30,000 to have an independent evaluator come in and do this, he said.<\/p>\n
Committee members insisted the society enjoyed an exemption from the requirement to periodically review its assets and it became \u201can issue\u201d at a meeting that month. Dodd then set out his position in writing that there was no exemption, he said.<\/p>\n
He was called to a meeting with the chairman and a committee member at the Castleknock Hotel in Dublin, during which he was told he was being dismissed. Dodd had a three-month contractual notice period, but no notice was provided for, the tribunal heard.<\/p>\n
Dodd said he \u201casked for a reason but wasn\u2019t given one\u201d. He gave back his work laptop, and left, he said.<\/p>\n
The society denied that Dodd made any protected disclosure.<\/p>\n
In his decision on the case, adjudicator David James Murphy wrote that the society \u201cfailed to adhere to any sort of fair procedure\u201d in terminating Dodd\u2019s employment.<\/p>\n
He ruled the society had caused its former manager \u201cserious financial loss\u201d by dismissing him \u201cin contravention\u201d of the Unfair Dismissals Act and awarded him \u20ac85,000.<\/p>\n
Barrister Frank Drumm appeared for the complainant, instructed by Collier Law; barrister Elizabeth Murphy was instructed by O\u2019Donoghue solicitors for the respondent.<\/p>\n
The society\u2019s lawyers had initially argued that since Dodd had less than a year\u2019s service, he wasn\u2019t shielded by the Unfair Dismissals Act.<\/p>\n
Dodd\u2019s legal team took the position that since their client was not paid notice, his service for the purposes of the Act had persisted longer than a year.<\/p>\n
They also advanced a second complaint under the same legislation alleging that the dismissal was \u201cwholly or mainly from [their client] having made a protected disclosure\u201d.<\/p>\n
Murphy sided with the complainant and accepted Dodd had sufficient service to pursue a complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act without recourse to the whistleblower protection provisions, which would waive the normal service requirements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An accountant who was sacked after raising concerns about the level of expenses at the Garda health insurance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9484,45,615,61,5167,60,43],"class_list":["post-325633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-christmas","tag-an-garda-siochana","tag-dublin","tag-ie","tag-insurance","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}