The Court of Appeal allowed the Board of Management of St. Annes School’s appeal against a High Court award of €255,276 to special needs assistant Una Ruffley, who had sued over alleged workplace bullying and harassment. In her judgment delivered on 8 December 2015, Ms Justice Irvine concluded that the evidence did not support the trial judge’s finding of repeated inappropriate conduct undermining Ms Ruffley’s dignity at work.
The dispute followed a September 2009 incident in which Ms Ruffley locked a sensory-room door while supervising a pupil. The board later imposed a Stage 4 warning. It considered the matter serious from a child-safety perspective; Ms Ruffley said other assistants had also locked the door and that she had not been told not to do so. The board rejected her appeal and stood by its warning after receiving a questionnaire reporting that four other assistants had admitted locking the door.
The High Court found that the board and principal had treated Ms Ruffley unfairly over more than a year, including through a disciplinary process that breached natural justice. It held that the conduct amounted to workplace bullying and awarded damages for psychiatric injury and past and future loss of earnings. The board appealed, disputing whether the conduct amounted to bullying, whether it caused the claimed injury, and whether the award was excessive.
The Court of Appeal judgment said the disciplinary process was “far from acceptable”: Ms Ruffley had not been told the precise complaint before the board considered it, had no hearing to defend herself, and the same body decided both the original matter and her appeal. The judgment said those failures could have supported proceedings challenging the validity of the board’s decisions. But the case before the court was a claim for damages based on workplace bullying.
Applying the requirement that bullying involve repeated inappropriate conduct that undermines workplace dignity, Justice Irvine found only one incident that might meet that description: a January 2010 meeting between Ms Ruffley and the principal. Even if that meeting was inappropriate, the judgment said, it was isolated and could not establish bullying. The court therefore rejected the basis on which the High Court had found for Ms Ruffley and allowed the appeal.
Justice Irvine agreed with her colleagues that the appeal ground challenging the causal link between events and Ms Ruffley’s psychiatric injury should fail. She also agreed, for reasons given by the President, that the appeal concerning damages should succeed. The judgment does not specify the resulting order on damages or set out the court’s disposition of costs.