A former employee of Astronomy Ireland says she was stripped of any work regarding financial matters because she "started to ask questions about the legality of some of the ongoings" at the organisation.
The worker, Nicole Doyle, was giving evidence after lodging complaints under the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994 against the management of Astronomy Ireland, with an address at Ballycoolin, Dublin 11.
At a public hearing into her complaint this morning, Ms Doyle said she was earning €538.47 a week gross for a 37.5-hour week as an administrator at the Ballycoolin office in 2022 and 2023, but was not furnished with a statement in writing of her terms of employment according to the required statutory timeframe.
"I had tried on multiple occasions to get a contract from them, via email, in person; any time anything relating to the contract came up, grievance reporting et cetera, I would say I need a contract because I need to do this – grievance reporting, sick reporting, anything you'd need a contract for," she said.
"They told me their solicitor… was sick, then she was on holidays, then sick again," she said.
Ms Doyle described a phone call with a person she said was in a position of authority at the organisation "grilling me over the bank balance not being high enough" about five or six months into her employment.
"I said it’s been a long time, I haven’t had terms and conditions of employment given [in writing]. I said it’s illegal to do so; I warned on this phone conversation I would be going to the WRC," Ms Doyle said.
Ms Doyle told the WRC that after the phone call she got a copy of that contract and that it had a clause telling her: "I’m never allowed speak about any of the ongoings in the company."
Leave terms and pay were "barely" addressed in the document and her stated weekly hours of work had changed from the 37.5 she had originally agreed to 39, she said.
"It was a contract for the company and not myself. It wasn’t to enable to me have a safe journey at work. It was to enable them to have a safe journey when they fired me," Ms Doyle said.
She also said her former employers "started to change my role constantly".
Ms Doyle said "anything to do with finances" was taken away from her "because I started to ask questions about the legality of some of the ongoings".
"Rather than helping me understand what was going on, they would take it away from me," she said.
Instead, her employers proposed to make her a "renewals officer" whose job would be "cold-calling members about their membership", she said.
"I said I am happy to change things around as the company needs, but I do need it in writing, and I never received it. I was happy to move forward, but I knew it wasn’t good for them to keep chopping and changing by word of mouth," Ms Doyle said.
Ms Doyle added that "a number of weeks in" she was informed by her employer that she was subject to a "probationary period", but when she asked for particulars in writing they were never given to her.
She said her employment with Astronomy Ireland came to an end when they "fired me".
There was no representative of the named organisation present when Ms Doyle gave her sworn evidence to the WRC – adjudicator Roger McGrath having delayed opening the claim for 15 minutes to allow extra time for a respondent to arrive.
"There’s no sign of the respondent. It may well be there’s a good reason why they didn’t show," Mr McGrath said.
Ms Doyle was accompanied at hearing by Sonya Martin, who said she was the complainant’s former manager in the organisation and that she had "witnessed a lot of the same grievances" and was pursuing a workplace rights claim of her own.
Mr McGrath noted that the respondent entity was not identified as a limited company in Ms Doyle’s complaint form and asked whether Astronomy Ireland was the "correct entity".
"We actually don’t know. I have a solicitor working on my case we can’t figure it out. The business was shut down in 2015, so we don’t know," Ms Martin said.
"Unless we hear from the respondents and there’s a credible reason to explain their absence, I’ll go ahead and make a decision," Mr McGrath said.
His findings will be given in writing in due course to the parties, and published at a later stage by the WRC.
