The Irish Heart Foundation (IHF) has been ordered to pay salary arrears and €15,000 in compensation to a 70-year-old worker who was discriminated against by being paid less than colleagues with the same job title.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) found the charity had breached the Employment Equality Act 1998.
Seamus Casey (70), who was a stroke support group coordinator, had accused the charity of ageist discrimination by forcing him to retire on December 31st, 2023, as he was approaching his 69th birthday.
He further alleged discrimination in respect of pay and terms of conditions of employment on the grounds of age – all of which was denied by the charity.
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Adjudicator Úna Glazier-Farmer concluded Mr Casey was discriminated against under the equal pay provisions of the equality legislation. She rejected his claim of discriminatory dismissal on the grounds of age.
“I felt, and I still feel, I was brilliant at what I was doing. I could still have been doing this job until I was 80 years of age, never mind 70,” he said at a hearing last year.
The tribunal heard Mr Casey transferred into the IHF in 2016, having previously been a stroke support group co-ordinator with the Volunteer Stroke Scheme.
He ran group meetings for stroke survivors in Co Louth and surrounding counties, as well as providing support to stroke survivors by phone and computer.
He said he had never expected the charity to enforce a mandatory retirement clause in his contract and that he was “wrong-footed” when he was told that his permanent contract would be expiring when he turned 65 in March 2020.
However, his employment continued past his retirement age on the foot of four fixed-term 12-month contracts.
Siobhan Browne, the charity’s HR director, said in a legal submission that at the time Mr Casey’s role was terminated, his contract set out a “mandatory retirement age of 65”. He “never objected to the retirement age; he simply asked to work longer,” she said.
Mr Casey also told the tribunal that before the expiry of his final contract, he discovered that younger colleagues with the same job title were receiving more than the €32,000 annual pro-rata salary he had been getting – up to €39,000 in the case of one named comparator.
He said that after raising this, the charity added a sum of €4,000 to his severance pay, as a backdated salary increase equivalent to €34,000 a year for full-time hours over an unspecified period.
The charity’s director of corporate services and finance, Helen Redmond, said there were “many factors” including qualifications and “benchmarking against the market” that had given rise to a situation where stroke coordinators were earning salaries on a range between €32,000 and €38,000 a year.
Jade Wright of Ormonde Solicitors, for Mr Casey, questioned Ms Redmond about a comparator identified by her client earning €39,000. Ms Redmond said that worker was not a stroke co-ordinator and was rather a worker in “social and digital marketing”.
Ms Glazier-Farmer put it to Ms Redmond that Mr Casey said the differential was down to his age.
“Oh, it’s nothing to do with age; that would never come into it. I would strongly say it’s nothing to do with it,” Ms Redmond said.
“What was it?” Ms Glazier-Farmer asked.
“I suppose it was the fact he was on a fixed-term contract. It got renewed at the same price as the previous year, and that was the honest answer,” the witness said.
In her decision, Ms Glazier-Farmer found that Mr Casey knew he was “being offered a final fixed-term contract and signed it”, rejecting his claim of discriminatory dismissal on the grounds of age.
However, the adjudicator wrote that there was “no evidence of objective justification … as to why the complainant was treated less favourably in being paid a lower hourly rate for like work”.
