The Supreme Court’s Mr Justice Fennelly agreed with the judgment delivered by Mr Justice Geoghegan in Ryanair Limited’s appeal concerning collective bargaining with pilots, but wrote separately to explain why he considered that the Labour Court had misunderstood an earlier judgment.
The Labour Court had found that it was not Ryanair’s practice to engage in collective bargaining negotiations for the relevant group of workers. As an alternative, it said that even if Ryanair did engage in such negotiations, an “excepted body” could not lawfully negotiate for the pilots involved in the dispute.
Fennelly said the Labour Court’s reading of his judgment in *Iarnród Éireann v. Holbrooke* [2001] 1 IR 237 did not support that conclusion. That earlier case concerned whether a body could be said to carry on negotiations when an employer refused to negotiate. In the present case, he said, Ryanair had not stated that it refused to negotiate with employees; the company maintained it was willing to negotiate with them, while refusing to negotiate with a trade union.
The Labour Court had relied on the pilots’ stated wish to be represented by their trade union, IALPA, rather than negotiate directly with Ryanair. It reasoned that those pilots could not realistically be members of an excepted body formed to negotiate directly, and that such a body could not lawfully bargain on their behalf.
Fennelly described the reasoning as circular. In his view, if a group of pilots was willing to negotiate directly with Ryanair, and Ryanair was willing to negotiate with that group, it would follow that the group could be an excepted body. He said the Labour Court’s conclusion effectively required Ryanair to negotiate with a trade union, despite its stated position.
He left aside the sufficiency of the evidence, which he said was addressed in Geoghegan’s judgment. The source is Fennelly’s separate judgment and does not set out the Supreme Court’s formal disposition of the appeal.