A veteran employee of the well-known Hairy Lemon pub in Dublin has won €30,000 for discriminatory dismissal on the grounds of age.
John Mooney (71) had worked as a maintenance man, having been rehired in 2014 after an earlier redundancy at the end of a 20-year career as barman at the pub on Stephen Street in Dublin 2.
He secured the award in a decision published on Wednesday on foot of a complaint under the Employment Equality Act 1998.
Mr Mooney told a March 2024 Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) hearing that his employer informed him in November 2023 that he would be dismissed at Christmastime “because [the pub’s] insurance had increased as a result of his age”.
At that meeting he was also referred to a mandatory retirement age of 66 in his contract of employment and was told he had “worked far beyond that”, Mr Mooney stated in evidence.
Mr Mooney’s evidence was that he made an attempt to get in touch with the owner of the pub, Peter Hanahoe, but that the owner told him he had to deal with a different man, Niall Duff.
Then, on a date in January 2024, Mr Hanahoe came to the complainant where he was working upstairs in the pub, handed him an envelope, and said: “Sorry about that John,” and walked down the stairs, Mr Mooney said in evidence.
The envelope contained a letter of dismissal, he told the WRC. When he went downstairs, the bar manager asked him for his keys, and he left, he added.
Mr Duff, the only witness to appear for the business, gave evidence that the company directors were “worried” about “some of the physical aspects of [Mr Mooney’s] role” and held the view “that an accident was waiting to happen”.
The company’s position was that the maintenance operative position had been made redundant.
Adjudicator Breiffni O’Neill found he preferred the evidence of the complainant because, despite the employer’s stance that the position was redundant, it had acknowledged that it did not pay Mr Mooney his redundancy.
He added that the company had not shown him “any written documentation or correspondence from their insurance provider” to back up the claim that keeping Mr Mooney on would have created “insurance cost issues”.
For that reason, Mr O’Neill wrote, he did not consider whether that might have amounted to a “legitimate aim” as defined in the equality legislation.
“In the absence of any other explanation from the respondent to justify the complainant’s dismissal, I find that they have failed to rebut the presumption of discrimination,” he added.
He awarded €30,000 in compensation for age discrimination, writing that Mr Mooney, as a man of 71, was “unlikely to find work again”.
