The Supreme Court has dismissed the Health Service Executive’s appeal in a dispute over whether Maurice Power was a fixed-term employee while serving as interim chief executive of the Saolta University Healthcare Group.
In a judgment delivered by Mr Justice Woulfe on 31 March 2022, the Court agreed that the Labour Court had erred in law when it treated Mr Power’s continuing permanent employment relationship with the HSE as preventing him from claiming fixed-term status for his temporary CEO appointments. It upheld the High Court order setting aside the Labour Court’s determination and remitting the matter for reconsideration.
Mr Power had been employed by the HSE as a permanent pensionable employee since 1999 and became Saolta’s chief financial officer in 2012. He took up the interim CEO role on 5 October 2014. The judgment describes five successive contracts for that role, each ending on a specified date or when a permanent CEO took up the post. The appointments provided that he would return to his substantive permanent position, or an equivalent position, when the interim role ended.
After accumulating more than four years in the interim role, Mr Power complained that the HSE had contravened the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003 by not offering him a contract of indefinite duration. The Labour Court rejected his complaint at the threshold, finding he lacked standing because he was already employed on an indefinite-duration contract. It did not decide whether objective grounds justified renewing the interim appointments beyond four years.
The High Court held that the interim CEO appointments could be successive contracts of employment even though Mr Power’s broader employment relationship with the HSE continued. The HSE argued in the Supreme Court that the appointments varied his 2012 CFO contract rather than creating separate contracts. The Court rejected that argument, noting that the CFO and CEO roles were different jobs and that the appointment documents described the CEO engagements as fixed-term contracts. It also concluded that the return-to-CFO provision was a term of those temporary contracts.
The Supreme Court held that Mr Power was a fixed-term employee during the relevant period for the purposes of the Act. It did not decide whether the renewals were objectively justified or whether he was ultimately entitled to a contract of indefinite duration. Those questions remain for the Labour Court on reconsideration.