A €40,000 allowance awarded to a prison officer almost ten years ago after an adjudication officer concluded his employer had failed to make appropriate accommodations for him at a time when he was suffering from disability was overturned by the court. Labor court.

The long-running case – which was previously the subject of action at the High Court, before being referred to the employment tribunal – involved prison officer Robert Cunningham, who had held the position since 2005, d First in Cloverhill then in Portlaoise.

Mr Cunningham had undergone back surgery in February 2015 and was later deemed unfit to return to full duty by occupational medicine specialist Dr Sharon Lim.

In a May 2015 memo, Dr Lim recommended a period of restricted functions to facilitate Mr Cunningham’s continued rehabilitation.

“Going forward,” she wrote, “our opinion is that Mr. Cunningham should be excluded from all control and restraint duties/training.”

It later emerged that when Mr Cunningham went to an appointment with Dr Lim in April that year, he had brought with him various informational documents relating to his medical condition, but had failed to deliver a letter given to him three weeks previously by his surgeon, Martin Murphy, suggesting he could return to full duty, but warning that he should initially avoid lifting weights of more than 20kg.

The court found that Mr Cunningham, who was represented by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, had sought to rely on existing medical evidence to assert, under equality laws in employment matters from 1998 to 2015, that he suffered from a disability and that no reasonable accommodation had been provided to him by his employer.

In fact, his superiors had told him Irish Prison Service he could not return to his normal duties if he was not fit to fulfill them completely, and his options, after three months of restricted duties, were to retire on health grounds or move into an administrative role which would have resulted in a significant drop in revenue.

However, during his testimony at a hearing earlier this year, Mr Murphy said he believed Mr Cunningham was fit to return to all his duties, including those involving the control and restraint of prisoners, and he had been of this opinion when he wrote the letter addressed to the complainant in April 2015.

“As part of the follow-up advice I gave him in 2015, I allowed him to return to work as a prison officer without restriction, but I gave him some common sense advice,” he said. “My advice today remains the same as in 2015.”

He said he had performed a similar operation on a number of people who worked in fields requiring physical exertion, such as athletes, firefighters and other corrections officers, who had all returned to work without restrictions.

When asked if he was familiar with the requirements of applying control and restraint techniques, he said yes, that he was a black belt in judo.

Dr Lim confirmed that she had not received Mr Murphy’s letter, but said her opinion regarding Mr Cunningham’s inability to return to full duty would not have been different if she had known of its content.

In her ruling, the deputy president of the tribunal, Louise O’Donnell, said the burden of proof was on Mr Cunningham to establish that he suffered from a disability during the relevant period, and that he did not had provided no medical evidence of this.

Even though the two medical experts called to testify, both called by the respondents, did not agree, the court concluded “that in applying the balance of probabilities to the information brought to court, the complainant does not “failed to establish that he suffered from a disability at the relevant time, and therefore his complaint must be dismissed.”