IFUT is seeking an urgent meeting with the Minister for Education and Skills, Ruairí Quinn, TD, to discuss plans by UCC to spend hundreds of thousands of euro of taxpayers’ funds on a High Court appeal against a binding ruling governed by the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act, 2003.

 

In a recent Determination, the Labour Court upheld a Rights Commissioner Decision that UCC should pay an IFUT member the amount of redundancy payment claimed by IFUT, statutory redundancy plus four weeks. UCC was represented in the Labour Court by one of the most expensive legal firms in Ireland at taxpayers’ expense. IFUT is now advised that, incredibly, UCC has retained this expensive law firm and have embarked upon a very costly appeal to the High Court, allegedly “on a point of law”.

 

IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, says the Minister should intervene “to prevent the college squandering more than 20 times the payment due to a former employee on a spurious legal adventure which seems designed purely to defer the payment. This is not a case of IFUT seeking more money from government. Instead it is asking the Department of Education to step in to prevent a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money”.

 

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

 

Documentation on the case, including IFUT’s letter to the Minister, is available here.