A tribunal has upheld the sacking of a scrapyard manager who denied calling a junior female employee the C-word and insisted he only went as far as spelling the word out as office “banter”.
“Do you know what they called you when you first came into the company? ‘C-*-*-T’,” the manager said, as he gave evidence on how he recounted the incident of 12th December 2023 to his boss a few days later.
“We were laughing and joking, it was all banter, that was it,” the sacked manager, Bernard McMahon, told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) last year in evidence on his claim under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 against the Hammond Lane Metal Co Ltd.
The junior female employee gave evidence under the pseudonym ‘Ms A’ after being granted anonymity by the tribunal last December.
READ MORE
She told the commission the incident happened in front of five staff and three customers in the weighbridge office at Hammond Lane’s site in Clondalkin, Dublin 22 – where Mr McMahon – a 25-year company veteran – was in charge.
She said Mr McMahon asked her: “Do you know how they called you when you started here?” and that she answered: “No.”
“He continued: ‘You was called a c***,’” Ms A said.
Ms A, who came to Ireland for work from another EU state over a decade ago said she had to admit she “did not know the meaning of this word” and would “Google it”.
At that point, Mr McMahon “decided to spell it for me: ‘C-*-*-*’,” she said – adding that those present “all laughed loudly”.
In his evidence, Mr McMahon said Ms A had entered the office and “initiated the laughing and slagging”.
“There was nobody laughing at her. She wasn’t tearful, she wasn’t upset, there was nothing,” he said.
He told the WRC that he only found out Ms A had made a complaint about him alleging that he “verbally abused her and harassed her and called her a c***” when the firm’s human resources manager called him in six days later for a “wee chat” on 19 December 2023.
His representative, business consultant Ken Stafford, asked: “Did you personally ever call [Ms A] the word?”
“Never called her the word,” Mr McMahon said.
In a decision published on Thursday, an adjudicator found that Mr McMahon failed to explain himself or address his employer’s “legitimate concerns” about his behaviour in a disciplinary process.
The complainant instead presented “technical and at times spurious procedural arguments”; kept “silent” and engaged in “quibbling over the exact phrasing of what he was alleged to have said”, wrote adjudication officer David James Murphy.
“This approach in no way protected his position and was probably fatal to his continued employment,” Mr Murphy added, as Mr McMahon had by then made admissions about his conduct.
He concluded that in light of the “all the circumstances” of the affair, the scrap metal firm “acted reasonably in deciding to dismiss the complainant” and did so in line with the Unfair Dismissals Act.
Mr McMahon was represented at hearing by business consultant Ken Stafford, while Katherine McVeigh BL represented Hammond Lane, instructed by Conor Fynes of Eversheds Sutherland.
