An estate agent who denied he meant he was quitting when he told his boss “I don’t feel like going into work today” has lost a claim for unfair dismissal.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has concluded it was more likely than not that the employee, Barry O’Brien-Lynch did quit in a phone call with his boss on Friday 17 February 2023.
It was five days before a meeting at which he claimed he was dismissed by his former employer, ES Reilly Estates Ltd, trading as Sherry Fitzgerald Reilly.
Mr O’Brien-Lynch said there had been a “spat, a spat that was building for a while” between him and his boss, Ed Reilly, that came to a head after a client of the Navan, Co Meath estate agency took issue with a buyer delivering boxes to a property the day before a sale was meant to close.
“They shouldn’t have had keys… The blame on that was being laid at my doorstep,” he said. “I felt a bit pissed off, to be honest. I said: ‘I don’t feel like going into work today. I’m going to turn around and go home,‘” Mr O’Brien-Lynch said.
“Did that mean just that you were going home, or you were going to resign?” his representative asked.
“Just go home,” Mr O’Brien-Lynch said.
Mr Reilly said the conversation “wasn’t irate” but that when he raised the matter of the house keys, his employee spoke to him “quite defiantly” and said: “I’ve a right mind to turn around the car and go home.”
He said it was said to him as he were “a child in the back seat”.
He said his response was: “Barry, that’s up to you, if you want to do that, you can.” He said Mr O’Brien-Lynch’s next words were: “You know what Ed? I’ve enough of this. I’m done, I’m outta here.”
He said he had expected Mr O’Brien-Lynch to work the following day, a Saturday, but that the complainant “went hunting” instead that day; failed to attend the following Monday, and dropped off his phone, laptop and keys on the Tuesday.
Mr O’Brien-Lynch said he met Mr Reilly and the company’s HR advisor later that day, and Mr Reilly’s position had been that he was “no longer willing to employ me”.
Questioning the complainant, the respondent’s HR advisor Niall O’Connell put it to Mr O’Brien-Lynch that he had asked him whether he was prepared to retract “I’m done, I’m outta here” remark at the meeting. “You said you didn’t,” Mr O’Connell said.
“This ‘I’m done, I’m outta here’, from my recollection, that never happened,” Mr O’Brien-Lynch said.
Mr O’Brien-Lynch’s case was that he was down €30,000 a year in earnings and had taken a job on a building site “to keep a few bob coming in” as a result of the alleged dismissal.
However, adjudication officer David James Murphy decided that Mr O’Brien-Lynch concluded on the balance of probabilities that he had resigned and dismissed Mr O’Brien-Lynch’s complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977.
