For the past two months official SIPTU pickets have been in place outside the gates of the vast Mount Congreve estate near Kilmeaden, Co Waterford. The action is in connection with a complex dispute which has become the subject of proceedings involving the Labour Court, the Labour Relations Commission and the Employment Appeals Tribunal.
The estate, flanking the Suir river, includes a stately home, several hundred acres of woodland and walled gardens, a wholesale nursery and a dairy and beef farm with some 450 head of cattle.
It is owned by 92-year-old Ambrose Congreve, whose family established it and built Mount Congreve House nearly 300 years ago. Mr Congreve, who also owns extensive properties abroad, has no children and is the last of his line.
Under legal deeds drawn up in 1979, the house and 71 acres of gardens were transferred to the Mount Congreve Trust and the Commissioners of Public Works were added to the nominated trustees, meaning effectively that the State will eventually become guardian of these assets.
From late 1997, a number of the 60 or so full-time employees on the estate applied to join SIPTU, and last January the union contacted the estate management asking for a meeting to discuss terms and conditions of employment. The management said the estate would only discuss conditions with the employees directly.
Various industrial relations procedures, some of which are ongoing, were then invoked by SIPTU seeking to establish right of representation and to negotiate terms and conditions.
Meanwhile, however, Paul Keane, one of the workers who had joined SIPTU, was called to a disciplinary hearing by the estate management in June. He was accompanied by a SIPTU branch official, David Lane, whose presence, according to reports, was challenged by management and "words were exchanged".
This matter is also to be the subject of industrial proceedings.
Mr Keane was dismissed, and this, according to SIPTU, is the issue over which the official strike has been called.
The estate management did not attend Labour Relations Commission meetings to attempt conciliation, and the union referred the issue to the Employment Appeals Tribunal. An initial tribunal hearing on August 11th set the date of September 9th for the opening of submissions, in spite of an application by a legal representative of the estate for a postponement on the grounds that key management representatives would be out of the country.
The following day, solicitors for the estate, in a letter to the union, said an adjournment would be sought and, if the tribunal refused to grant it, "our instructions are to immediately either appeal the matter to the Waterford Circuit Court and/or to seek leave to judicially review the decision of the Employment Appeals Tribunal on the grounds that the decision is in breach of natural justice and fair procedures by denying our clients the right to proper defence."
This letter was raised by the union when the tribunal sat in Waterford last Friday. Appearing for the estate, Mr Fergal Dennehy, of the Cork firm of solicitors, Ronan Daly Jermyn, said his client intended defending the case in full.
The chairwoman of the tribunal, Ms Moya Quinlan, said she would grant an adjournment and set September 29th and 30th for the hearing.
Meanwhile, pickets remain at the estate. Eleven workers who are SIPTU members are on strike, and 15 others are refusing to pass the pickets. Milk-tanker drivers are also not passing the pickets, and an estimated 350 gallons of milk a day from the commercial Friesian herd are having to be disposed of or dumped. Some commercial customers of the estate nurseries have also turned away.
The strikers say that, apart from the dismissal issue, they have a range of grievances about working conditions on the estate and their treatment by management.
Mr Lane says they are in a very protracted dispute at this stage and if the management is determined to "go down the legal road" rather than use the industrial procedures provided by the State, matters could drag on for up to a year.
Mr Congreve, a widower, is understood to be in the south of France until October. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he worked with Unilever in England and China from 1929 to 1936 and served with British Air Ministry Intelligence and the Ministry of Supply in the second World War. He was chairman of Humphreys & Glasgow Ltd from 1955.
Mr Dennehy, on behalf of the estate, has declined to comment on the dispute.