Focus Ireland used a prop wedding ring for publicity photos shot in 2019 after being presented with ad agency research showing donors were "less likely to support single parents" who had fallen into homelessness, a tribunal has been told.
The details were disclosed to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) at a hearing into an unsuccessful complaint under the Employment Equality Act 1998 against the charity by a former employee. The case was dismissed.
Aoife Cooney, a single mother-of-two, quit as the organisation's digital media and marketing manager in 2022 after accusing the charity's chief executive officer, Pat Dennigan, and its director of advocacy, Mike Allen, of bullying.
She contended that this was because of her status as a single mother.
A WRC adjudicator found that the 2019 photoshoot was beyond her jurisdiction, while the findings of a research agency and the use of that information was not an indication of the culture at Focus Ireland.
Ms Cooney joined the charity as campaigns manager in 2015 before being promoted to the marketing role in mid-2018. She said in her evidence that she decided to become a sole parent and became pregnant in January 2019.
An ad agency report commissioned by the charity 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 in her evidence.
A month or two later, Ms Cooney said, she was in charge of organising a photoshoot depicting homeless people.
Having been instructed "only to depict married parents in the photoshoot" and that "people in parental roles must show a wedding ring", Ms Cooney said she provided a "prop" wedding ring for the purpose.
Ms Cooney said that some of the actors used in the photoshoot were Focus Ireland staff who were "uncomfortable about the instruction" about only showing married homeless parents, but that she "tried to play it down".
She took maternity leave between October 2019 and July 2020, when her return was under remote working arrangements due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ms Cooney said that online meetings of the charity’s executive team "became extremely difficult", with "interruptive and hostile" questioning becoming a feature.
Her evidence was that she could not always get to the end of her presentations and that Mr Dennigan, the CEO, and Mr Allen, the head of advocacy, were "highly charged and emotional" and were in the practice of questioning her while she was still presenting.
After a second period of maternity leave from March to November 2021, Ms Cooney said the executive team meetings "got progressively worse", describing them as "a terrifying experience".
Prior to February 2022, when she said she asked to be allowed not to present to the meetings, she had been prescribed medication for situational anxiety, Ms Cooney said.
Ms Cooney’s solicitor, Robert Jacob of Jacob and Twomey Solicitors, said in a legal submission that a colleague who had taken charge of Ms Cooney's duties during her maternity leave "was not interrogated in the way the complainant had been" at the meetings.
In March 2022, Ms Cooney handed in her notice and subsequently lodged a formal grievance, the tribunal was told.
Mr Twomey said that as his client had been told that recordings of five Microsoft Teams meetings she had identified in her grievance were "missing" and could not be reviewed, it was her position that an investigation was "not possible".
Focus Ireland's barrister, Des Ryan BL, told the WRC that it "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" - citing a five-month delay to a website project Ms Cooney had been given which he said had an impact on fundraising.
The CEO, Mr Dennigan, and the head of advocacy, Mr Allen, thought Ms Cooney was "not effectively addressing the challenges presented by the project", he submitted.
She faced "reasonable, appropriate and legitimate questions, comments, responses and reactions" to the progress of the website changes, he added.
Mr Ryan added that the reason Ms Cooney quit was because she "got a better job". 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".
"The fundamental core issue is that the complainant is shoe-horning a complaint of discrimination into a complaint about bullying," he added.
In her decision on the case, adjudicator Catherine Byrne wrote that Ms Cooney "did not point to a single incident or remark on the part of mher employer that inferred, even remotely, that she was treated less favourably because she is a single parent".
It had "no bearing on how she was treated by the members of the executive team", she added.
She wrote that the 2019 photoshoot 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".
"The findings of a research agency regarding the willingness of the public to donate and the use of that information is not an indication of the organisation’s culture," Ms Byrne wrote.
She wrote that Ms Cooney, as a "senior professional" in the charity, was in a position to raise any concern she had with 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 added.
"Robust challenging of an employee about their work is not discrimination, even if that employee is a single parent," Ms Byrne concluded, dismissing the complaint.
