A banking professional who moonlighted for nearly three decades, “pulling pints” at a Dublin pub, was unfairly sacked and denied severance pay because the bar owners “just didn’t want to pay him” his redundancy entitlements, his solicitor has alleged.
Alan Ecock, who has worked for AIB since 1994, told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) on Tuesday that his co-workers at the bank knew nothing of his second job as a bar manager at Kavanagh’s in Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, where he started as a lounge boy in the late 1980s before he claims he was unfairly sacked in April this year.
Denying a series of statutory claims against the pub, a solicitor acting for its owners, the Peacock family, has insisted Mr Ecock worked at Kavanaghs as a self-employed contractor with no employment rights – a position branded “a parade of fiction” by the complainant’s solicitor, Setanta Landers.
“The reality is, the guy was working in the pub forever, part of the fabric of the pub, Covid hit, and they didn’t want him anymore,” Mr Landers said.
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“They came up with this self-employment contract because they’re in a cost-cutting exercise and it’s expensive to pay an employee statutory redundancy who’s been there for 34 years,” he added.
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Mr Ecock said he started as a lounge boy at Kavanaghs at the age of 14 and kept working there four nights a week all through college because after losing his father as a teenager he “felt obliged to provide” for his mother in her old age.
“I was the eldest boy of two – that’s why I accepted the position and worked as hard as I did to ensure my mam had stability in later life,” he said.
He kept the same hours up when he signed a full-time contract with AIB in 1994 – only cutting back to two nights a week when he got married in 2013, he said.
“I was trying to earn as much money as I could to ensure I had as much money later in life,” he said
“Were colleagues in AIB aware you were pulling pints in a very central pub in Dublin four nights per week,” Mr Landers asked him.
“No,” said Mr Ecock.
In a legal submission, the Peacock family’s solicitor Bríd McCoy argued that Mr Ecock had told one of the former owners of the pub that his first contract with AIB “prohibited” him from holding a second PAYE role – and that the pub group adjusted his tax credits accordingly.
“That conversation never took place,” Mr Ecock said when Ms McCoy put it to him in cross-examination.
“Unfortunately, Mrs Peacock isn’t in good health [and] cant be here to give that evidence,” Ms McCoy told the remote hearing.
Objecting, Mr Landers said that if a witness was not going to appear and give sworn evidence, the allegation could not be put to his client.
Company director Patrina Peacock told the WRC that the pub’s original owners, her parents Noel Peacock sr and his wife Rose Peacock, had been forced to retire from the trade as part of a remortgaging arrangement with Bank of Ireland, yielding control of the hospitality group to their four adult children.
Despite selling two pubs – the nearby Hynes’s of Prussia Street and The Tap on North King Street – Ms Peacock said there were “not enough significant cost savings without looking at staffing”.
She said she started by examining the “more expensive” contractors in the pub group – and said Mr Ecock’s €250-a-shift pay made him the best-paid worker on an hourly basis at Kavanaghs after her sister Louise, who was also a proprietary director of the firm.
Pressed by Mr Landers on the exact number of contractors who were working for the overall hospitality group, Ms Peacock said three out of six had been cut across the group, but Mr Ecock was the only worker in the Kavanagh’s operating company affected.
“So you’re saying none of the common-sense, non-financial commercial information ... where someone said: ‘We can’t let Alan go, sure he’s an institution inside in the pub’ – that was never discussed at your directors’ meeting?” Mr Landers asked her.
“I don’t have the luxury of common sense. I have to keep the mortgage paid and keep Revenue paid so my decisions have to be strictly financial,” Ms Peacock said.
Mr Ecock’s complaints were brought under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, the Redundancy Payments Act 1967, the Payment of Wages Act 1991, the Minimum Notice and Terms and Conditions of Employment Act 1994 and the Organisation of Working Time Act 2004 against the pub’s operating company Pundit Ltd, a subsidiary of N&R Peacock Holdings Ltd.
Mr Landers said his client was seeking six weeks’ lost earnings, eight weeks’ notice pay, a sum in respect of annual leave, compensation for the failure to provide written employment terms and statutory redundancy for 32 years’ service at €250 a week – noting that his client’s service before between ages 14 and 16 was not reckonable.
In a closing submission, Ms McCoy said the complainant’s involvement with Kavanagh’s was “dictated by his preference and his lifestyle and his own arrangements”.
“He’s working in AIB, he’s a ‘focused career banking professional’ in his LinkedIn profile. To profess that he was under the misapprehension that he was an employee at Pundit, or Kavanagh’s, is clearly incorrect and we would contend he was well aware of that [self-employed] status,” she said.
“We would contend that he was not unfairly dismissed, that he’s not entitled to any redundancy pay and all the other claims are unfounded on the basis that he was not an employee,” she concluded.
Mr Landers said the Peacock family’s argument that Mr Ecock was self-employed was a “parade of fiction” which they had been unable to support with evidence.
“[Mr Ecock] was a dinosaur in the pub in their eyes and they got rid of him. They came up with this self-employment contract because they’re in a cost-cutting exercise and it’s expensive to pay an employee statutory redundancy who’s been there for 34 years. They just didn’t want to pay him – it’s as simple as that,” he said.
“It is totally undignified, it is totally transparent, and the WRC should take a very firm view on it because [he] is and ought to be protected by employment law,” Mr Landers added.
Adjudicating officer Pat Brady closed the hearing on Tuesday and is now considering the question of Mr Ecock’s employment status, which he called a “gatekeeper” to the substantive issues in his claims.
Along with Kavanagh’s, the Peacock family’s remaining hospitality interests include the Breiffni Inn off the Navan Road in Dublin 7 and a number of establishments in Swords, Co Dublin, the tribunal was told.
