A former State employee who was put on administrative leave for sending a mass email to colleagues calling the lack of ability with the Irish language in the organisation “shameful” has failed to make out a series of employment rights claims.
Seanán Ó Coistín, who was employed via a staffing agency as a communications executive at the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), was close to the end of his final contract when he sent the email the morning before a staff Christmas party in December 2024.
He had pursued complaints under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003, and the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 in relation to the termination of his employment.
All of his complaints were rejected in decisions published on Thursday by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
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The complainant told the WRC he experienced a series of “microaggressions against the first official language” over the 2½ years he spent working at the agency.
These included being asked whether he was a member of Sinn Féin when he disclosed his background as a native Irish speaker to a manager, and what he said was an “attitude” that it was “annoying” to provide official publications as Gaeilge.
“When I leave the FSAI, there will be zero Irish language capacity ... there is no one else who is fluent and can speak it, read it and write it to an advanced level,” Ó Coistín wrote in the email.
“The sad fact is that when I am gone, there will be more Polish, Spanish, French and Italian in the FSAI than Irish. As an Irish State agency, that is shameful,” he wrote.
He added that the only “real excuses” for not wanting to learn the language were that a person was “an anti-Irish racist” or “lazy”, a tribunal has heard.
In his evidence to the WRC, Ó Coistín said he was upset that a human resources manager at the agency had accused him of “racially harassing people” with the message.
Ó Coistín said in his evidence the FSAI was full of “very nice, highly educated people”, but there was “no competency in Irish”.
FSAI’s human resources manager Jackie Wall gave evidence that she was approached with several verbal complaints before she had an opportunity to read the email herself. Two staff members addressed complaints in writing “about how upset they were by some of the language used”.
“People were, I would say, angry, hurt, there was a range of emotions in the office on that particular day,” she said.
Her concern was that it would turn into a “keyboard warriors” situation, with “words going back and forward” on the email system and staff WhatsApp groups. “One word can lead to another, to another, and that can cause a bigger issue,” she said.
Counsel said Ó Coistín had been “exonerated” of the alleged breach of the diversity and equality policy, but that the investigation found that he did breach the agency’s email policy.
Ó Coistín argued that his email amounted to a protected disclosure in respect of the spending of State money and compliance with the Official Languages Act.
However, the agency’s barrister, Peadar Ó Maoiláin, said Ó Coistín had failed to identify alleged wrongdoing in his email and was out of time to pursue a whistleblower complaint.
In two decision documents published by the WRC on the dispute on Thursday, adjudication officer Breiffní O’Neill ruled that Ó Coistín had not been dismissed when he was placed on administrative leave, as his pay continued.
The “operative cause” for the termination at the end of 2024 was the expiry of the fixed-term agency contract – meaning he had no jurisdiction to rule on the matter under the legislation.
O’Neill found further that Ó Coistín had been too late in filing a further set of statutory complaints under the Protected Disclosures Act and the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Workers) Act to challenge the events of December 2024 as either penalisation or less-favourable treatment.
The adjudicator rejected an argument advanced by Ó Coistín that he was disadvantaged by the fact the State had not published an Irish-language version of those laws.
