The former chief executive of Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) has said that he made a statement to gardaí that he was "being blackmailed" by a senator in a bid to force him to reinstate a suspended senior employee.
Francis O'Donnell is pursuing complaints under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 and the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 against the State agency.
Today was the second day of the hearing of his case at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
The tribunal heard that Mr O’Donnell’s departure from IFI last summer, prior to the expiry of his five-year term, came about by way of dismissal.
In February 2022, Mr O’Donnell has told the hearing, he suspended a senior employee - district river basin director Pat Gorman - pending an investigation into allegations raised in an anonymous protected disclosure.
Mr Gorman’s brother, Fintan Gorman, was the chair of the IFI board at the time.
Mr O’Donnell’s evidence is that, in spring 2022, he was subject to pressure to reinstate Pat Gorman.
Governance issues being discussed by the IFI board at the time became "suddenly significant", Mr O’Donnell said.
Following a closed board meeting, from which he was excluded by the chair, the matters at play were subject to a "leak" to government minsters and senior officials, Mr O’Donnell said.
There was "pushback" when he urged the board to make a formal report on the leak, he added.
Mr O'Donnell said that he met Fintan Gorman on three occasions in March or April 2022.
One of them, in Co Donegal, was "very, very tense" and "very, very heated", with the chairman seeking to "raise issues about the suspension of his brother".
Another meeting with the chair, at the House Hotel in Galway in early April 2022, was "very, very similar", Mr O’Donnell said.
The complainant said the chair told him: "He had the numbers to have a vote of no confidence in me and remove me as CEO".
At a third meeting, around 19 April that year, the chair said "he’d make things public about me that would be very damaging about me and my wife", Mr O’Donnell said.
Gardaí told of 'significant fraud' at IFI
Mr O’Donnell said that he went to gardaí twice in summer 2022 to tell them that he believed "significant fraud had occurred in IFI".
He said he told them that he was being "pressurised by the former chairperson" not to proceed with "any process in relation to that fraud" and that a protected disclosure about him was being used in a bid to have the chair’s brother "reinstated".
"I advised the gardaí how I came into that knowledge, in terms of the pressure that was being exerted," Mr O’Donnell said.
He added that a senior official at the Department of the Environment "told me the senator had called him in person, to say that the ask was that if I didn’t do it and reinstate the individual, the disclosure would be made public, and would be very damaging".
"I advised the gardaí that I was being blackmailed by that senator at that time," Mr O'Donnell said.
He said the same department official also told him that the senator made another allegation about the chief executive to another senior civil servant.
Mr O’Donnell said the allegation was that "I had links to the Continuity IRA".
'Very serious allegations' made about public official
In the wake of this testimony from Mr O’Donnell, adjudicator Michael MacNamee asked the complainant whether there was a garda investigation into his complaint who confirmed there was.
"Was there any prosecution?" Mr MacNamee asked.
"There was no prosecution," Mr O’Donnell said.
Mr MacNamee said he had asked the parties twice - at case management sessions heard behind closed doors - whether the case required "any reporting restriction" or a hearing wholly or partly in private.
Neither side made any submission to him in that regard, he said.
"Had we known what was going to emerge, we may have thought it fairer and more prudent in the round to seek a private hearing," said counsel for the respondent Tiernan Lowey.
"Very, very serious allegations have been made about a public official who is not present," Mr Lowey said.
"To an extent, the genie is out of the bottle," Mr MacNamee said, and it made "very little sense" to hear the matter in private, but that he was "actively contemplating" the imposition of reporting restrictions.
When the case resumed this afternoon, a lawyer instructed by The Irish Times, Matthew Austin of Hayes Solicitors, was in attendance and acknowledged by the adjudicator.
After hearing from both parties that they were still not seeking a private hearing, Mr MacNamee said he had "given the matter some thought".
"I would propose to hear the matter in public as I have already done, not least because evidence has already been given and third parties have been named already," he said.
Mr MacNamee confirmed to Mr Austin that he had not imposed reporting restrictions today.
The allegation against Pat Gorman was that he "had an IFI tractor at home for a significant period of time" - that was "beyond use for IFI" - and that he was "using an IFI fuel card" to fuel it, Mr O’Donnell told the tribunal yesterday.
The WRC heard in separate proceedings, in 2023, that these allegations were not upheld.
However, Mr Gorman was ultimately dismissed by IFI for his conduct after he was suspended. The dismissal was ruled unfair by the WRC.
The WRC heard, in that case, that Mr Gorman had his teenage son drive the tractor back to an IFI site on the night he was suspended and went away with a fisheries boat, to investigate a tip-off about eel poaching, he said.
Mr Gorman said that it had been an "error of judgment" to have his son drive the tractor and the WRC considered him to have contributed to his own dismissal.
He said his family had been "destroyed" by false rumours that he had been sacked for fraud.
