A Department of Social Protection employee has claimed that she was discriminated against and subjected to bullying and harassment as a result of taking parental leave from her role at an Intreo centre in Offaly.
Caroline Hollands filed a series of complaints to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) in relation to her employment, including discrimination on grounds of disability.
She also alleged that she had been penalised for taking parental leave, and filed separate actions under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act, and the Protected Disclosures Act.
Ms Hollands had been provided with certain accommodations in respect of the fact that she was completely deaf in one ear, which could make it difficult to hear people – particularly in noisy environments.
She claimed that some of these accommodations were withdrawn and she was moved to a desk located directly below a speaker in the office after she made a complaint under the department’s dignity at work policy.
An adjudication hearing of the WRC heard that Ms Hollands had successfully applied for a shorter working year at the time of the complaint, and was taking every Friday off in the form of parental leave. She had also availed of annual leave and bereavement leave.
A performance review last year stated that Ms Hollands struggled to focus and spent a lot of time on leave applications. It added that she needed to realise that the workload of other staff increases when she is absent.
She had received approval by email for plans to take parental leave each Friday, but this request also needed to be formally submitted through an IT system every six weeks.
In May 2024, she failed to properly submit the request and, after she failed to turn up for work the following Friday, she was marked as absent without leave. When she sought to retrospectively amend this, her request was refused.
She was advised by WRC adjudicator, Breffni O’Neill, that it was necessary for her to identify someone in a similar position who had been treated more favourably in order to prove discrimination.
He asked if she knew anyone who had been marked absent and subsequently allowed to change this to a day of annual leave, Ms Hollands said she may have done so previously before IT systems were changed.
“You can’t be your own comparator,” said Mr O’Neill.
Niall Fahy, barrister for the department, argued that, if anything, Ms Hollands had been penalised for not taking parental leave. She had suffered some disadvantage because she did not submit the request correctly, he added.
Mr Fahy suggested that it was the number of requests for unplanned leave at short notice that had become an issue for the department – not her parental leave, and he outlined a number of these.
Ms Hollands replied that her managers had approved these requests, and it was their prerogative to refuse them if they were causing undue disruption in the workplace.
However, Mr Fahy suggested that she had become “very upset” when she was refused leave in the past, and that this had created a reluctance among her managers to decline requests. Ms Hollands denied this.
The WRC hearing will resume before Mr O’Neill in June.
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