WRC rejects Mary Dempsey’s equality complaint over professorship bid

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

The Workplace Relations Commission rejected Mary Dempsey’s complaint that the University of Galway discriminated against her on gender and age grounds when it turned down her 2022 application for promotion to professor. The university denied the allegations.

An earlier Equality Tribunal ruling had awarded Ms Dempsey €81,000 for gender and disability discrimination and reinstated her as a lecturer. Her SIPTU representative, Marie O’Connor, argued that the promotion assessment had ignored restrictions arising from the earlier discrimination and that assessing her work during that period continued it.

The WRC found that the university had not discriminated against her. Adjudicator Peter O’Brien noted the compensation in the earlier case and Ms Dempsey’s position that the previous discrimination should have been taken into account. He said she was not entitled to preferential treatment based on generic and unsupported claims of age and gender discrimination, and that adjusting the scoring to account for her earlier circumstances could have led other candidates to claim discrimination.