The publisher of IrishCentral.com has been ordered to pay €12,000 to a long-standing employee it made redundant after stopping press on magazines aimed at the Irish diaspora due to falling readership.
The employee, Sinead Behan, won the sum on foot of a complaint to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 against Irish Studio Media Publishing Limited.
The tribunal heard that in addition to operating the IrishCentral.com website, the company had been the publisher of five magazine titles which all ceased printing between 2019 and May 2023, when the firm stopped press on ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’.
Ms Behan’s job had been to oversee print subscriptions on these titles, and was “no longer needed”, the company’s chairman said in evidence.
His evidence was that the “significant decline” of the diaspora-focused titles and a knock-on loss of advertising revenue led to the company racking up losses of €211,115 by the end of 2022, before it stopped printing Ireland of the Welcomes.
Ms Behan’s position was that she was “publishing director” for the company’s magazine portfolio since December 2021, having worked across a variety of other roles in the company since she first joined in 2003.
The WRC heard a new chief executive officer (CEO) was appointed in January 2022. Ms Behan said that she had reported directly to a co-chairman of the company until that point. In September 2022 she lodged a grievance against the CEO, the WRC heard.
Ms Behan’s solicitor, Setanta Landers, submitted that the publisher “abandoned” the grievance process in the spring of 2023. A redundancy process was launched the following July, the tribunal heard.
The publisher’s corporate counsel, Christopher Bedor, told the tribunal in a legal submission that an assertion by Mr Landers that the company was “financially healthy” amounted to a “misstatement of fact”.
The chairman had denied this in evidence. Ms Mulcahy also noted that the chairman had been “unable to confirm that the complainant’s redundancy money had been paid in full”.
She noted the uncontested evidence was that only around €8,000 out of an estimated €25,332 due to Ms Behan by way of statutory redundancy was paid.
She concluded that the “back story” of conflict between Ms Behan and the CEO did not displace “incontrovertible evidence that there was a diminished to non-existent requirement to retain her in the role of publishing director”.
She made a finding that Ms Behan’s employment ended as a result of redundancy – but also concluded that the company engaged in an “inadequate” redundancy consultation, rendering her termination an unfair dismissal.
Ms Mulcahy noted that Ms Behan was at a loss of €21,631 between September 2023 and February 2024, when she started a new job, but had received the “partial redundancy payment” of €8,331.
She decided an award of €12,000 for unfair dismissal was “fair and equitable in all of the circumstances”. She rejected a further claim for statutory redundancy made by Ms Behan under the Redundancy Payments Act 1967.
