The Health Service Executive had to pay an €80,000 bill for travel and subsistence expenses built up by a manager in its estates department who was left reporting to nobody for 15 years until he retired, the WRC has noted.
The sum, paid out on foot of an internal dispute resolution process, was revealed as the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) ordered the health service to pay the worker another €31,666.78 for unpaid annual leave that had built up over the decade and a half.
The order was made on foot of a complaint against the HSE under the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 by Martin Beirne after the employment tribunal rejected its argument that Mr Beirne was never stopped from taking his leave but was in charge of his own holidays.
Mr Beirne's evidence was that an "unusual management structure" had emerged after the HSE moved to abolish his position in 2008, but couldn’t find an alternative job for him and simply left him in place as a property manager.
His case was that after this point, he was left in charge of a team of five, working "independently" with "no line management" and not knowing "who the senior manager was" – a situation that persisted until he looked to retire in April 2022.
Heavy work demands made worse by the lack of line manager support meant he could not take his full annual leave, but no manager ever told him that he needed clearance from senior bosses to carry over his leave entitlement, he told the WRC.
He said he logged all his working hours and leave on the HSE’s computerised record system and that these filings were never disputed.
The HSE, which was represented by human resources manager Graham Finlay at a series of hearings on the claim last year, argued that it never "denied" Mr Beirne his annual leave and insisted it had been left up to the employee himself to manage his own holidays.
"With no procedure in place to sanction when or indeed if he took his holidays, it became a matter for the complainant to take his own annual leave as he chose. If he chose not to take that leave that was a matter for him," the HSE submitted.
It further argued that Mr Beirne would have needed senior management clearance to carry over annual leave and that the WRC’s jurisdiction in the matter could not stretch back to 2007.
The WRC noted that Mr Beirne only took his full annual leave entitlement once in 15 years of service, in the 2008 to 2009 leave year. In the decade from 2012 to 2022, Mr Beirne was left short between 7 and 11 days in each leave year, the tribunal also recorded, with a total shortfall of 104 days compared with the worker’s statutory entitlement.
In her decision, adjudicator Emile Daly wrote: "The trouble from the [HSE’s] point of view is that there appears to have been very limited management of the complainant’s work at all, not just in respect of the management of his holiday taking."
The adjudicator was "satisfied in the absence of any evidence to the contrary" that Mr Beirne did not take his full leave because of "work demands" and ruled his complaint to be well-founded.
"I find that the lack of any effective line management of the complainant resulted in him not losing his accumulated and untaken annual leave and this carried over to the end of his employment," Ms Daly wrote.
She added that the HSE was "not entitled to contend that it was up to [Mr Beirne] to manage his own annual leave because that does not meet [its] obligations" under the European working time directive and the case law in the area.
"If a manager had discussed the matter with the complainant and advised him that if he did not use his annual leave entitlement that he would lose it, the outcome of this decision would be other than it is. But that did not happen, or if it did, that hasn’t been evidenced," Ms Daly concluded.
She awarded Mr Beirne 104 days’ pay for the untaken leave, to be paid at his daily rate of pay in each of the relevant annual leave years between 2007 and 2022, calculating his total loss of statutory annual leave at €31,666.78.
Ms Daly also noted the resolution of an earlier dispute between Mr Beirne and the HSE on unpaid travel and subsistence expenses, which she said was "nothing to do with the complaint" before her.
"The fact that [Mr Beirne] received €80,000 of unpaid travel and subsistence is only relevant to show that for a significant amount of time the complainant carried a debt for travel and expenses that should have [been], and eventually was, discharged by the respondent," the adjudicator wrote.
