The National Council for Special Education (NCSE) has been ordered to pay €33,000 to an employee who argued she should not have had to organise in-person school visits during the Covid-19 pandemic as they were contrary to safety regulations at the time.

Maire Aherne appealed the rejection of four complaints she made at the Workplace Relations Commission to the Labour Court, which found in her favour in two instances.

Aherne told the court she was penalised when she received final warnings for acting, as she saw it, in accordance with the restrictions as they applied to workplaces at the time.

The NCSE contended it was entitled to discipline Aherne for her failure to act on instructions from line managers. She was the subject of protracted disciplinary procedures involving a number of internal appeals and the use of external investigators by the NCSE.

Aherne was a civil servant, employed by the NCSE since 2004, when the pandemic broke out, and her different complaints concerned a number of overlapping periods between May 2021 and February 2022.

She told the Labour Court that when she raised concerns over an instruction to arrange in-person visits to schools, a normal part of her role as a special education needs organiser (Seno) before the pandemic, her line manager reported the situation to a personnel manager.

Aherne was then warned that if she did not comply with the instruction, she would be subject to disciplinary procedures and risked losing her job.

The disciplinary action proceeded and after a number of meetings with management, and failed appeals processes, Aherne was issued with a final written warning.

When an external appeals officer was then employed to review the case, he recommended restarting the process due to the lack of a proper investigation at the outset.

Mary Paula Guinness, a barrister specialising in employment law, was brought in to conduct an investigation. She concluded the complainant had unreasonably refused to comply with one or more management instructions to arrange dates for school visits in line with her role.

With the process restarted, Aherne was again served with a final written warning and lost an internal appeal. Another barrister, Niamh O’Carroll Kelly, was recruited for a further external appeal and found it should succeed as one of the managers involved in the process had prejudged the outcome.

The NCSE, however, rejected the appeal, arguing that under the Civil Service Code the findings of an external appeal are only a recommendation and are not to be considered binding.

The Labour Court, in its written decision, signed by deputy chair Alan Haugh, described this decision as “extraordinary”, given the barrister’s finding effectively suggested the entire process had been flawed from the outset.

It also said the motives and thought processes of the decision-makers in such a case were of critical importance, but the NCSE had passed up the opportunity to call witnesses.

These, it said, could have sought to establish for the court that the action taken against Aherne was unrelated to the concerns she had raised under the Safety and Health and Welfare at Work Acts 2005-2014, which offer protections against penalisation where this is the case.

It followed, the court said in its decision, that the NCSE had not established that the actions taken were unrelated to the complainant’s claim that she was acting in accordance with the regulations, and so her appeal must succeed.

This applied in two of the four appeals taken as part of what was described as a “web of litigation” initiated by Aherne. She was awarded €16,500 in each instance, and the other two appeals were rejected.