Plumbing company forced to pay plumber €28,000 for reporting concerns about a faulty drill

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A plumbing firm has been ordered to pay an ex-worker €28,000 for penalising him when dismissing him after he raised health and safety concerns over an unsafe practice involving a drill at work.

In her findings, Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) Adjudicator, Emile Daly has described the conduct of employer, Dallan & Co Mechanical Services Ltd in the case as ‘egregious’.

Ms Daly stated that the €28,000 award to plumber, Ryan McMullan “is just and reasonable” where the employer was aware that another employee had been recently injured working with the unsafe drill equipment within a system of work that was inherently unsafe.

Ms. Daly determined that Mr. McMullan was penalised by the company for violating the Paternity Leave and Benefit Act of 2016 and ordered the firm to pay him an additional €1,366 based on the undisputed testimony of Mr. McMullan.

On August 4th, 2020, Mr. McMullan started working for the company. Ms. Daly stated that she was confident Barry Dallan fired Mr. McMullan on September 23rd, 2020, because he raised a safety concern and refused to utilise the damaged equipment.

According to Ms. Daly, Mr. McMullan's employer treated him "like a trouble-maker."

According to Ms. Daly, if the employer had not already known about the prior injury, "I could make the observation that Mr. McMullan was doing them a favour by raising this safety concern because it put them on notice of a risk that one of their workers could be injured, possibly more seriously given that they were drilling into concrete, sometimes at a height."

She added, however, that such a statement would be false because the company was already aware of this risk and yet they insisted that Mr. McMullan perform this inherently dangerous activity.

Ms. Daly claimed that the company's actions appeared careless toward the possibility that one or maybe several of their employees might suffer injuries.

Profits 

"In this adjudication, I am reminded of the statements made by the then High Court judge Mr. Justice Peter Kelly when he criticised the director of a construction business that had engaged in major violations of the Health and Safety at Work Acts in the 1990s," said Ms. Daly. You are allowed to benefit from your employees' sweat, but you are not allowed to profit from their blood, he remarked.

The only positive part of this situation, according to Ms. Daly, is that Mr. McMullan was not hurt, unlike his coworker, but this was not because of safeguards that his employer should have made sure were in place.

According to Mr. McMullan's testimony, he had to use a hand-held SDS drill while being represented by a lawyer, Andrew Turner of Hamilton Turner Solicitors.

He added that in order to stabilise its operation when drilling into concrete, the drill required an additional component, an impactor.

Without such an impactor, using a drill on concrete can result in the drill bit jamming, which is very likely to injure the user's wrist or arm or, more dangerously, cause them to fall from a height if they were drilling into a ceiling, as Mr. McMullan was doing.

Coworkers informed Mr. McMullan while he was on paternity leave that a colleague had hurt his eye while using this drill and that this was due to the drill's lack of an impactor.

Upon his return from leave, Mr. McMullan stated that he was shocked when Barry Dallan gave him instructions to operate the drill on the morning of September 23, 2020, again without an impactor.

Barry Dallan was informed by Mr. McMullan that he would not use it since it was risky and reminded him of his colleague's accident from the previous week.

According to Mr. McMullan, Barry Dallan warned him that there would be no employment for him there if he didn't use the drill.

The workers had been hunting for an impactor for some time, according to Mr. McMullan, who then went home and sent his supervisor, Dave Dallan, a brother of Mr. McMullan's line manager, Barry Dallan, an email expressing his hope that the matter might be resolved.

We'll leave it there, Dave Dallan said Mr. McMullan over the phone.

Then, Mr. McMullan sent Dave Dallan an email to inquire as to what he meant by "We'll leave it there."

By email, Mr. Dave Dallan responded at 13:44 and confirmed that Mr. McMullan had been fired.

He claimed that he was fired due to problems with the management and the fact that he had left the job site without telling anyone.

The company showed up for the first day of the hearing but not the second, and Mr. McMullan was not cross-examined by his former employer over his testimony.