An Irish Times journalist has accused her employer of religious, sexual and political discrimination and victimisation, a tribunal heard yesterday.Ms Suzanne Breen is taking action against The Irish Times at a Fair Employment Tribunal in Belfast.
Ms Breen worked for the newspaper's Belfast office for a number of years but is currently on medical leave on the grounds of stress after being transferred against her will to the Dublin headquarters of the paper.
Details of her case against her employer emerged during an application by a lawyer for the The Irish Times to have the hearing adjourned to a later date.
The tribunal is expected to rule on the application today.
Ms Breen's case centres on her non-appointment as Belfast-based deputy Northern editor of the paper in 2001, not being allowed thereafter to act up as Northern editor when the editor was absent - even though she had previously done so - and her subsequent failure to be appointed to the post of Northern news editor.
Mr John O'Hara , acting for The Irish Times, told the tribunal that part of Ms Breen's complaint was the consequences that followed from her non-appointment to either job.
When, as part of a cost-cutting exercise, staff in the Belfast office were reduced, Ms Breen was redeployed to Dublin in 2003. Mr O'Hara said: "She contends this represents ongoing discrimination and victimisation."
But he said the paper would deny this and contend it had a contractual right to move staff around.
He applied to have the case adjourned to a later date saying an independent investigation into the conduct of a senior member of staff in Dublin was being carried out and there was "some overlap" with the case to be heard by the tribunal.
The investigation, he said, was into the conduct of an employee whom Ms Breen had complained about when he worked in Belfast in 2000. He had left the North and nothing further was done.
The matter arose again in 2003 when Ms Breen was transferred to Dublin, he said, at which point she raised an assurance she had been given in 2000 that in the future she would not have to work again with the person she had complained about.
As a result, there was now an investigation going on that included events in 2000, he said.
Ms Breen had worked in Dublin for four or five months last year before going off on sick leave, he said.
She remained on sick leave on full pay, said Mr O'Hara, adding: "Happily she is able to do other work as a journalist including a column for the News Letter - we are not complaining about that, it is perhaps an indication of the extent of the ill health."
Mr Tony McGleenan, for Ms Breen, called for the tribunal case to go ahead. He said she was suffering from considerable stress, was on stress leave, and seeing an occupational therapist.
If the case was not progressed now she would have to live under the stress for an extended period.
He accused the newspaper of putting forward the Dublin investigation as a "smokescreen and red herring".
It was the applicant's case that this was "entirely separate and can have no bearing on" the tribunal case.