Dublin City University has reached an "agreement" in a discrimination claim by a senior manager whose lawyers accused college authorities of "corporate gaslighting" about a restructuring plan.
Accusing the college of ageist and sexist discrimination, Deirdre Wynter told the Workplace Relations Commission she had spent 19 years working her way up to become head of marketing at the college only to have duties, responsibility and prestige stripped from her and given to a new director ten years her junior.
DCU denied Ms Wynter's complaint under the Employment Equality Act 1998.
Its barrister, Rosemary Mallon BL, argued that there was "no grand conspiracy" by college authorities to discriminate against Ms Wynter with the restructuring plan after the departure of former DCU president Briain MacCraith.
Rather, she said, a reorganisation of the management structure under new president Prof Dáire Keogh had seen a "sledgehammer" put through other departments and by comparison Ms Wynter's area in marketing and communications had seen only a "very minimal" change "putting it back the way it was".
Ms Wynter's case was that a new director, the former Industrial Development Agency press officer Céline Crawford, was hired in on a fixed-term contract as director of communications in August 2019 without any open competition taking place - a breach, she said, of college policy.
She said she would have applied for the directorship if it had been advertised again.
Ms Wynter told the tribunal she had applied when there was an open competition in 2016 - only for DCU to appoint nobody and split the business area in two - setting up her own marketing department and a distinct communications department, both reporting directly to a vice-president.
Ms Mallon had pointed out in her submissions that when Ms Wynter went from acting status to permanency as head of marketing there had been no open competition either.
However, she began to raise concerns when a series of job ads referring to a combined "marketing and communications" department were published by the university in the summer of 2021 - only to be told by Ms Crawford that the departments had been merged since the previous December and that the complainant had been told as much in December 2020 by DCU deputy president Professor Anne Synnott.
Ms Wynter said the purported meeting with Professor Synnott in December 2020 never took place, even though other department heads had been consulted with in relation to reforms affecting their departments
Mr Lowey, for the complainant, produced correspondence obtained from the college’s systems under a GDPR data subject access request dating to May 2021 stating: "It’s time to spell it out to Deirdre and marketing."
Ms Wynter said she believed the correspondence had been sent from Ms Crawford to the Professor Synnott and demonstrated that there had been a "surreptitious" move in relation to the restructuring.
"It also felt disrespectful, as though I was somehow stupid," the complainant said.
"It’s a bit hackneyed [but] I believe my client has been subjected to a type of corporate gaslighting," said her barrister Tiernan Lowey BL, who appeared instructed by O'Mara Geraghty McCourt in the matter.
He said his client "was not told about the merger", but that "sectors within the respondent continued to tell her she was wrong".
Ms Wynter lodged a grievance with her employer in July 2021, and when it had not been processed by November that year, lodged a discrimination claim with the WRC.
After that, she said the university’s then-deputy HR director asked her to "shelve" her grievance to have an informal discussion, Ms Wynter said.
At that meeting in December 2021, the former deputy HR director admitted the deputy president had stated the purported consultation meeting with Ms Wynter a year before had not, in fact taken place.
The grievance outcome called the failure to consult with Ms Wynter on the departmental merger as an "oversight" and apologised, but called reorganisation "a natural occurrence when there is a change in senior management", Mr Lowey said, quoting from the document.
"It just felt career-ending for me," Ms Wynter said of the grievance outcome letter.
"When the director of HR looks you straight in the eye and says: 'I can’t defend the indefensible’ you take that as okay."
"When you receive correspondence; I am to stay where I am… you know it was just that they had decided to cancel me. They decided to cancel me in the most underhanded way possible," Ms Wynter told the WRC earlier this week.
However, the grievance letter did not concede the allegations of discrimination made by Ms Wynter over the affair.
The complainant said that her position was further "eroded" in the wake of the grievance when she was removed as the chair of an interview panel for the department and she was persuaded by her GP to take medical leave over her stress levels.
Ms Wynter said she found out about the merger of her department into Ms Crawford’s when an external job ad seeking an administrative assistant went out without edits she said were required to make it clear to applicants the position was to be a "shared resource" between two distinct marketing and communications departments.
"Mr Lowey wants you to believe a gender-neutral group, all of a similar age profile, not dissimilar to the age profile of the complainant, decided to discriminate against her because of age and gender. He is requiring you to believe there was a grand conspiracy. I say to you that is simply not the case," Ms Mallon said in a legal submission.
At the close of proceedings on Tuesday adjudicator Penelope McGrath said she was inclined to believe the matter would require up to two more days in evidence, and excused Ms Crawford from attending yesterday for personal reasons as she adjourned the hearing overnight.
She said Ms Wynter faced a "hard day" under cross-examination the following day.
However, after the planned reopening of the hearing was put back for around an hour and a half yesterday, the parties met the adjudicator and confirmed to Ms McGrath that the matter had been resolved.
"We have come to an agreement, subject to being reduced to writing," Ms Mallon told the adjudicator, a position confirmed by Mr Lowey on behalf of the complainant.
"I really welcome the parties actively collaborating on finding a landing space. This was going to be a very hard case, so I really welcome the parties collaborating. Well done," Ms McGrath said.
Ms McGrath agreed to keep the file open for nine weeks in case of correspondence from the complainant's solicitor seeking to re-enter the matter, adding that she would contact the parties to confirm the withdrawal of the complaint on 13 December if she heard nothing further.
