Senior officials in the Unite trade union wanted to “do a deal” with Brendan Ogle on an exit package so that he would not pursue a promotion to become regional secretary for the Republic of Ireland, a witness has told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
The witness told the tribunal that an approach was made last year by Peter Hughes, Unite’s regional secretary for Wales, who had been appointed to investigate a grievance brought by Mr Ogle complaining that he had been sidelined when he returned to work in 2022 after surviving a “very aggressive” cancer.
Giving evidence on Mr Ogle’s complaint under the Employment Equality Act 1998 on Tuesday, the former Mandate general secretary John Douglas confirmed that he told senior Unite officials at one point that he believed Mr Ogle had been “stripped naked in public” with “the dogs in the street barking that he’s a busted flush”.
“Brendan had one of the highest profiles of any trade union official in the country as leader of Right2Water; [he was] the leader of very many other campaigns, so to see Brendan being humiliated in the way he was after the way he came back from cancer to do the job he did on behalf of the working class … it was shoddy,” Mr Douglas said.
Mr Douglas, who represented Mr Ogle in an internal grievance process, said there was “sniding, between-the-lines” remarks to Mr Ogle about his position as senior officer in the Republic of Ireland being “a makey-up job” arranged with the union’s former general secretary Len McCluskey.
“There’s something going on here which smells to high heaven, whether it’s regime change, whether it’s cancer, whether it’s his face,” Mr McCluskey was recorded as saying in one document read into evidence by Mr Ogle’s barrister.
Mr Douglas gave an account of a video call with Mr Hughes, the union’s Welsh secretary, after Mr Ogle applied for a vacancy as Republic of Ireland regional secretary. On the call, Mr Douglas said Mr Hughes told Mr Ogle: “There’s a lot of anxiety over here in head office about you applying for that job, and we’d prefer it if you didn’t go to the interview.”
Mr Hughes then went on to say: “Maybe we can do a deal,” Mr Douglas said. “It was hinting towards an exit package,” the witness added.
Mr Ogle attended the interview in London in November 2022 anyway, but did not succeed, the tribunal was told. The complainant gave evidence earlier this year that he objected to the union’s former chairman Tony Woodhouse sitting on the interview panel because of a speech made by Mr Woodhouse to a union conference two months earlier which Mr Ogle claims defamed him. The complainant’s position is that although Mr Woodhouse recused himself, the interview process was tainted.
Mr Douglas said after Mr Ogle was rejected for the job, they met Mr Hughes and the union’s head of HR, Barbara Kielim, again in Unite’s London headquarters.
“It wasn’t a grievance meeting. It got into them wanting to table sort of an exit package. Brendan hadn’t really any interest in that.” Mr Douglas said.
Mr Ogle’s position was that he was concerned about losing a death-in-service policy worth five times his annual salary, expressing concerns about his family’s financial stability if his cancer came back, Mr Douglas said.
“It came up that to get an annuity for a death policy of five times the salary would be an extraordinary amount of money. It all got a bit messy,” Mr Douglas said. “We said put it in writing to us. They committed to put it in writing, we’re still waiting for that,” he said.
Mark Harty SC, instructed by Karyn Harty of Dentons Solicitors for the respondent, said Mr Douglas had referred to without prejudice discussions in his evidence, which was denied by the witness.
He put it to Mr Douglas in cross-examination that the duties Mr Ogle was seeking as a senior official in Ireland leading political campaigns and meeting politicians “no longer existed”.
“No one ever said that didn’t exist … no one ever said there’s been a change in strategy, we don’t need that type of role any more,” Mr Douglas replied.
“It was like playing handball off a sponge, there was nothing coming back,” Mr Douglas said.
When Mr Harty asked the witness who had taken the political role from Mr Ogle, and Mr Douglas said he didn’t know, Mr Harty asked whether he followed politics.
“I follow football, but I couldn’t tell you who Man United won against last week,” Mr Douglas said.
“Brendan Ogle was very high profile doing it,” Mr Harty said.
“To tell the truth, Unite’s not high profile any more – it’s gone off the map,” the witness said.
“That might have been the intention … to focus on industrial relations within the union,” Mr Harty said.
“And shaft Brendan Ogle?” Mr Douglas retorted.
Counsel for the complainant Mary-Paula Guinness said her instructing solicitor, Peter Murphy of McInnes Dunne Murphy, had written to Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham on Tuesday asking her to attend voluntarily and give evidence.
Adjudicating officer Elizabeth Spelman said she would allow until Friday this week for Ms Graham to respond; after which she said she would hear an application by Ms Guinness for a witness summons.
The case was set to proceed into Wednesday and Thursday this week, but these dates have now been vacated.
Mr Ogle gave evidence earlier this year that he was told on August 22nd, 2022, by a colleague in Dublin, Tom Fitzgerald, that the union’s general secretary Sharon Graham wanted a new strategy for Ireland drawn up – and that she had made a “directive” that Mr Ogle was not to be included in it.
He said Mr Fitzgerald drew a plan on a whiteboard as he did so. On Tuesday another witness, Junior Coss, secretary of the Unite branch in ESB Energy, said he had seen this whiteboard with the plan described by Mr Ogle when he met Mr Fitzgerald in his office on August 25th, 2022.
There had been “friction” in the ESB branch and during a discussion on the issues, the witness said, Mr Fitzgerald went to the whiteboard and “started to talk about the way forward for himself”.
“Eventually, by the end of the meeting, I could see Brendan Ogle’s name wasn’t on the board. I just asked the question: ‘What about Brendan Ogle?” Mr Coss said.
“He [Mr Fitzgerald] said as far as he was concerned he [Mr Ogle] wasn’t part of the strategy and that he would be retiring over time,” Mr Coss said.
Mr Harty later remarked that Mr Fitzgerald was again being portrayed as a “Bond villain” laying out his plans, echoing a characterisation he made in respect of a similar account given by Mr Ogle.
He said that at a later meeting in February 2023 in Dundalk with the union’s regional officer Jackie Pollock he asked why Mr Ogle could not “get involved in the ESB stuff”.
Mr Pollock told him “it had nothing to do with him, that this is being sanctioned from London, the Brendan issue” and that Mr Pollock “couldn’t do anything about it”, he said.
Mr Harty, for the respondent union, told Mr Coss: “Tom Fitzgerald doesn’t doubt if you were in the office on 25 August you might have seen the whiteboard; he doesn’t recall going through any of it. He’s certain he would not and did not say what you said he did.
“I have to put it to you, you have a false recollection in relation to the entire meeting,” Mr Harty said.
“No,” Mr Coss said.
Counsel added that Mr Coss’s account of Mr Fitzgerald saying Mr Ogle would be “phased out” and “retiring over time” was not true.
“Mr Harty, I know the truth,” the witness said.
“You’re a close friend of Brendan Ogle,” Mr Harty said.
“Mr Harty, I know Brendan Ogle the same as I know everyone else in the union. We are friends, we work together, same as Tom Fitzgerald, we are friends,” Mr Coss said.
