A woman who claimed she was bullied for being a single parent while working for homelessness charity Focus Ireland has had her complaint dismissed by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
During the hearing, Aoife Cooney alleged a prop wedding ring was used in publicity photographs taken for the charity after it received research suggesting that donors were less likely to support single parents who became homeless.
She quit her role as Focus Ireland’s digital media and marketing manager in 2022 after making her claims of bullying against the charity’s chief executive, Pat Dennigan, and director of advocacy Mike Allen. She took a case against the charity under the Employment Equality Act 1998.
Ms Cooney said she joined Focus Ireland as campaigns manager in 2015 and was promoted to the marketing role in 2018. She said she decided to become a sole parent and became pregnant in January 2019.
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She said an advertising agency report, commissioned by the charity and presented in July 2019 by Mr Allen, contained a finding that the public was “less likely to support single parents over families”.
Ms Cooney said she later took charge of organising a photo shoot depicting homeless people and was instructed “only to depict married parents in the photo shoot” and that “people in parental roles must show a wedding ring”. She said she provided a “prop” wedding ring for this purpose.
She said she took maternity leave between October 2019 and July 2020 and returned under remote working arrangements during the Covid-19 pandemic. She said online meetings of the charity’s executive team “became extremely difficult” with “interruptive and hostile” questioning a feature.
She said she could not always finish her presentations and that Mr Dennigan,and Mr Allen were “highly charged and emotional” and questioned her while she was still presenting.
After her second period of maternity leave ended in November 2021, Ms Cooney said the executive team meetings “got progressively worse”, describing them as “a terrifying experience”. Before February 2022, when Ms Cooney asked to be allowed not to present at the meetings, she said she was prescribed medication for situational anxiety.
Robert Jacob, of Jacob and Twomey Solicitors, for Ms Cooney, said in a submission that a colleague who took charge of Ms Cooney’s duties during her maternity leave “was not interrogated in the way the complainant had been” at these meetings. Ms Cooney handed in her notice in March 2022 and subsequently lodged a formal grievance, the tribunal heard.
Des Ryan, for Focus Ireland, told the WRC the charity “denies the complainant was subjected to any inappropriate, degrading or humiliating treatment as she has alleged”.
He said participants at the executive meetings were expected to be prepared for “professional challenge and performance management in governance structures”.
He cited a five-month delay to a website project Ms Cooney was involved in, which he said had an impact on fundraising. He said Mr Dennigan and Mr Allen thought Ms Cooney was “not effectively addressing the challenges presented by the project”, adding that she faced “reasonable, appropriate and legitimate questions, comments, responses and reactions” to the progress of the project.
Mr Ryan said the reason Ms Cooney quit was because she “got a better job”. He said the outcome of the grievance investigation was that Focus Ireland “could have done some things better, particularly around online meetings” but that “bullying did not occur”.
In her decision, WRC adjudicator Catherine Byrne found Ms Cooney “did not point to a single incident or remark on the part of her employer that inferred, even remotely, that she was treated less favourably because she is a single parent”. She said it had “no bearing on how she was treated by the members of the executive team”.
She said the 2019 photo shoot was beyond her jurisdiction, but added that there had been an attempt by the complainant side to “conflate” the ad agency’s research findings with “an assumption that [Focus Ireland] is biased against single parents”.
She said Ms Cooney, as a “senior professional” in the charity, was in a position to raise any concern she had about this in 2019.
“The fact that she did not do so leads me to conclude that the use of couples in the photo shoot was not a matter of concern to her at the time,” Ms Byrne said. “Robust challenging of an employee about their work is not discrimination, even if that employee is a single parent.”
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