The WRC found that Paul O Dwyer’s unfair dismissal complaint against Kildare County Council was not well founded. The decision was dated 19 September 2024.
O Dwyer joined the Council as a retained firefighter in 1988 and later became a Substation Officer at Naas Fire Station. He argued that his original contract allowed him to work beyond 60, and that he had to resign and take a lower-paid caretaker job in a Council library after the Council refused to extend his service.
The Council said it applied an established retirement age of 60 and that O Dwyer had chosen to resign before his expected retirement. The adjudicator accepted that the 2003 collective agreement preserved O Dwyer’s earlier contractual terms. However, the Council’s decision to apply its retirement age was one a reasonable employer could have made and did not breach a fundamental term of his contract. Constructive dismissal is a resignation treated as a dismissal because of an employer’s conduct; the adjudicator found that test was not met here.
A separate Employment Equality complaint was automatically withdrawn after the required response was not received by the deadline, so its merits were not decided. No award was recorded.