The High Court has refused to quash three Labour Court decisions challenged by former labour inspector George McLoughlin, after extending the time for him to bring his judicial review case.
In a judgment delivered electronically on 12 May 2022, Mr Justice Barr ruled that the challenge was within time. Mr McLoughlin had tried to lodge papers in March 2020, but delays followed deficiencies in the documents and Covid-19 restrictions. The court extended the deadline to 20 July 2020.
Mr McLoughlin had worked as a labour inspector from 1999 until retiring at 65 in January 2017. He alleged that management at the Workplace Relations Commission and the National Employee Rights Agency penalised him because he made a protected disclosure in 2015. The court’s account records those as his allegations; it did not find that a campaign to remove him had occurred.
The first challenged decision, PDD203, dismissed as out of time his complaint that refusal of his application to remain in employment amounted to penalisation. Mr McLoughlin said he delayed making the complaint because the issue was included in mediation with his former employer. The High Court found that he had not explained why he did not lodge the complaint after mediation ended, and refused to quash the Labour Court’s decision.
In PDD204, the Labour Court rejected a later penalisation complaint concerning alleged bias in earlier Labour Court hearings. The High Court found no basis to set that decision aside. It said the former Labour Court chairman’s past work with the WRC director did not establish objective bias in the circumstances, and that the bodies’ statutory roles did not create a reasonable apprehension of structural bias. It also upheld the finding that Mr McLoughlin had not identified penalisation within the relevant six-month period.
The third decision, UDD209, concerned his unfair dismissal claim. The Labour Court had found that an earlier decision on the retention issue created issue estoppel, and that the normal retirement age barred the claim under the Unfair Dismissals Acts. The High Court upheld those conclusions.
Mr McLoughlin argued that the Labour Court should have considered age discrimination and EU law. The High Court said the case before the Labour Court was an unfair dismissal claim, not a claim under the Employment Equality Acts, so it did not need to decide the age discrimination issue. It also noted that Mr McLoughlin had withdrawn his retention application in November 2016 and had made no further application. The question of whether that application was wrongly refused was therefore moot.
The court declined all relief sought. It invited written submissions on costs within two weeks; the judgment did not determine costs.