Pub group boss ordered to pay ‘bullied’ ex-girlfriend €104,000

THE owner of a Dublin restaurant, pub and hotel group has been ordered to pay €104,000 to an ex-girlfriend for her unfair dismissal from the business.

The two first met 31 years ago and were in a relationship for 10 years.

After their relationship ended, they remained best friends and the company boss is the godfather of the woman’s only daughter.

The woman started working at the business 26 years ago and the company has grown from a small bar to a large business today, made up of bars, a hotel and spas, apartments and restaurants.

One of the group’s businesses includes a hotel and bar near Temple Bar in Dublin.

For the first 10 years, the two ran the business together and at the time of her unfair dismissal, the complainant was employed as operations director.

In her hard-hitting ruling, WRC adjudication officer Niamh O’Carroll Kelly found that the business owner “took advantage of his personal relationship with the complainant in an attempt to force her out of the company so as to ensure minimal financial impact on the company”.

Ms O’Carroll Kelly said the company owner “went so far as to use his relationship with the complainant’s daughter to force her to accept a wholly inadequate package to secure her exit from the company”.

“I am satisfied she was subjected to a prolonged campaign of verbal abuse, stonewalling, bullying, intimidation and emotional manipulation all of which were at the very serious end of the spectrum,” Ms O’Carroll Kelly said.

“She was shouted at, sworn at, emotionally blackmailed, emotionally manipulated, stonewalled by her colleagues on the instruction of her employer, intimidated by her employer on countless occasions, bullied into accepting inadequate settlement/ redundancy packages.”

Ms O’Carroll Kelly said she was “fully satisfied that it will be some considerable time before the complainant will recover from the treatment she was subjected to at the hands of her former employer”.

Ms O’Carroll Kelly said the complainant “was totally blameless in relation to her dismissal”.

She ordered the company to pay the operations manager two years salary after hearing uncontested evidence from the complainant concerning her treatment.

The woman told the WRC she had been emotionally destroyed due to the treatment she had received at the hands of the company owner.