Labour Court upholds ruling that firefighter’s annual leave complaint was out of time

The Labour Court upheld the decision that Mr Laurence A. Skelly’s complaint against Dublin City Council over payment for accrued annual leave was out of time. The appeal was determined on 22 February 2021. Skelly, a retired firefighter, argued that his efforts to resolve the dispute through the council’s internal process justified filing late. The council agreed with the original decision and said the process had not prevented him from making a timely complaint. The Court found that pursuing the internal process did not provide reasonable cause for the delay. It also found no evidence that filing on time would have been more detrimental than the correspondence Skelly had pursued. The complaint was found to have been brought outside the time limit and was not well founded; the merits of the annual leave calculation were not decided.