Bullied teacher awarded €75,000

A High Court judge has awarded €75,000 damages to a teacher against the board of management of Ballinteer Community School arising from “deliberate and conscious” bullying and harassment of her by the school principal who at one stage hired a private investigator to follow her.

Dr Austin Corcoran, principal of the school, behaved “like an offended tyrant” towards home-school liaison co-ordinator Bridget Sweeney in his dealings with her after March 2007, Mr Justice Daniel Herbert said.

Dr Corcoran’s conduct was not excused by the fact Ms Sweeney’s own behaviour during this period, in general and in particular towards Dr Corcoran, was “inappropriate and should not have been tolerated by the board of management”.

Ms Sweeney (56), a separated mother of two, Beaver Row, Donnybrook, Dublin, had claimed she had to retire in 2009 from her €70,000 a year post on a €32,000 per annum pension due to illness suffered as a result of various actions of Dr Corcorcan.

She also claimed she was consistently overlooked for a post of responsibility or promotion for which she was qualified.

The board denied her claims and the court heard an investigation carried out by a barrister into earlier complaints of bullying of her by Dr Corcoran in incidents in 2005 and 2006 had not upheld those complaints. Those earlier complaints were not before the court which ruled on matters from 2007 on.

The judge said Ms Sweeney had returned to work in March 2007, after 209 days certified sick leave due to work-related stress, with a plan to avoid contact with Dr Corcoran of possible and, where that was not possible, to stand up to him and insist any communication between them happen in the presence of some other person acceptable to her.

Ms Sweeney had not communicated with the principal or deputy principal and while, from October 13th 2007, no one really knew what she was doing in her working day, he was satisfied she was carrying out her duties as home-school liaison co-ordinator with the same dedication she always had.

The evidence established, on the balance of probabilities, Ms Sweeney suffered a psychiatric illness, in the form of clinical depression, between February 2008 and June 2010, arising from the continuous bullying of her by Dr Corcoran from March 28th 2007, he ruled.

This mental injury resulting from the bullying was reasonably foreseeable by both Dr Corcoran and the board of management and there was a breach of the employer’s direct duty of care to Ms Sweeney, he said.

He accepted evidence Ms Sweeney has recovered, while suffering anxiety at times, and said there was nothing which should inhibit Ms Sweeney resuming her work and working efficiently with Mr Sweeney as professional colleagues.

The evidence established it was “quite usual” for some teachers in large schools not to be on speaking terms with others, he noted.

He also did not believe the actions of Dr Corcoran amounted to “wilful and conscious” wrongdoing and would not award exemplary damages, the judge said. However, because the actions involved oppressive conduct by Dr Corcoran, he was including €5,000 aggravated damages in the total award of €75,000.

The decision of Dr Corcoran to engage a private investigator for covert surveillance of Ms Sweeney during school hours over four days in February 2008 amounted to “most serious harassment” of Ms Sweeney, he said.

Dr Corcoran, the judge noted, hired the investigator after making genuine attempts to have the board and the Department of Education Inspectorate take action arising from his reasonable concerns about his “total lack of information” about where Ms

Sweeney was and what she was doing in her capacity as a home-school liaison co-ordinator.

Dr Corcoran’s efforts to involve the inspectorate met with no success and the response of the board, though well-intentioned, was “too little, too late”.

Mr Justice Herbert upheld some of the complaints made by Ms Sweeney about the conduct of Dr Corcoran and dismissed others.

On her complaints about being followed by two investigators in a car, the judge said, while Ms Sweeney was well capable of asserting what she considers to be her rights, she is “still a woman” and the experience of being followed about in her working day by a car with two men inside must have been “truly terrifying”.

Despite being fully aware of Ms Sweeney’s “long and totally uncharacteristic” absences from work in 2005, 2006 and 2007 due to work-related stress, Dr Corcoran arranged for her to be “stalked” by an investigator when he knew, or should have known, she was very vulnerable to some form of mental breakdown.

While the board did not authorise the actions of Dr Corcoran, it was vicariously liable for wrongful acts committed by him in the course of his employment, the judge said. The board owed Ms Sweeney a direct duty of care as her employer, under the

Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, to take reasonable care to prevent her suffering mental injury in the workplace as a result of being bullied by other employees if they knew, or should have known, that was occurring.

From March 2007, the board should have known Ms Sweeney was continuing to claim she was being bullied by Dr Corcoran and should reasonably have foreseen a serious risk she would suffer some form of mental illness if that situation was permitted to continue.

Despite this, the board took no reasonable or proper steps to address the situation. While there might be a reasonable basis for its view its code of procedures were slow and complex and lawyers had turned the situation into “a legal morass”, this was not a reasonable ground for taking no action at all for ten months, he said.