A garda with severe asthma withdrawn from a work-from-home arrangement and ordered back on the beat during a winter Covid-19 surge in 2022 was discriminated against – but is too late to recover compensation, a tribunal has found.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has dismissed an equality complaint against the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána by Garda Joseph Joyce, a veteran of over two decades’ service with the force.
It was because too much time had passed between the withdrawal of the work-from-home arrangement and the move to file an equality complaint at the WRC.
Joyce, who was based at Longford Garda station when the pandemic reached Ireland, said he suffered from chronic respiratory conditions including severe asthma and severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) and required the regular use of inhalers.
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At a hearing last year, Emma Davey, for Joyce, said her client had been granted special leave by the force on foot of medical advice in April 2020. He was at a “very high risk of severe illness” from Covid-19 and was to “rigorously follow cocooning guidelines”, she submitted.
That advice was ignored by local Garda management when they ordered him to return to work in person on New Year’s Day 2022, it was further submitted.
The State had denied his complaints, saying there were “appropriate measures” in place in the district to shield Gda Joyce and his colleagues.
Giving evidence last year, Joyce said he told local superiors he would continue working from home on the basis of medical advice when he was first asked to come back to work in December 2021.
The tribunal heard that a senior officer wrote to Joyce on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2021 directing him to either produce a report from a medical specialist or report for duty the following morning at 7am.
Joyce told the WRC he spoke by phone with Supt Seamus Boyle on New Year’s Eve and had received an assurance that he “would not be dealing with people” but was ordered to go out on foot patrol in Longford town the next day, January 1st, 2022.
“I was horrified, to tell you the truth,” Joyce said.
He said he was sent out on patrol without a working radio that day, which he said was in breach of protocol, and encountered members of the public who failed to abide by social distancing advice.
Joyce’s complaint form stated that due to this “disregard” for his condition, he became unwell and was “signed off work ... due to work-related stress” following these events. He was ultimately transferred to a different division.
Joyce’s superior, Sgt Brian Boland, said in evidence that he “absolutely rejected” that he sent Joyce out on the beat in January 2022 without a working radio. He said the radio issued personally to the complainant had “presumably shut down”, but there were “plenty of pool radios available” at the station.
Boyle said in evidence that because so many of his personnel were out on long-term sick leave with injuries or Covid-19, he “had to look at anyone who might be available”.
“We needed our frontline staff back on the frontline,” he said.
Mary Gildea, a senior civil servant in Garda administration in the region, said Boyle had contacted her about getting personnel working from home back to their former duties in August 2021.
Joyce had started receiving “welfare visits” at home from senior gardaí and took issue with short notice being given and the arrival of marked Garda vehicles at his home. It was “a bit much”, he said.
He confirmed to the WRC he was by then “double vaccinated” against Covid-19.
Recounting the evidence of the State’s witnesses in a closing legal submission last year, State counsel Dylan West said the now-retired Boyle, had been clear that he “simply never would have said Garda Joyce would never have been working with people”, West said.
In her decision, issued on Thursday, adjudication officer Penelope McGrath said it seemed to her that by sending Joyce back to work without having him seen by a doctor or conducting a personalised risk assessment, the force had discriminated against him.
However, she rejected the argument that the discrimination had continued while Joyce remained out of work on sick leave in 2022.
That left too much of a time gap between the discrimination and the filing of his complaint to the WRC in November 2022 for her to have jurisdiction to uphold his statutory complaint, she found.
