The former CEO of a state agency has told a tribunal he contemplated suicide after his bosses allegedly pressured him to quit following “damaging” media leaks and political “interference” in an internal investigation.
“Those days were very dark, and very, very hard,” Francis O’Donnell said in evidence to the Workplace Relations Commission.
Mr O’Donnell was giving evidence today on his complaints under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 and the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 against Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI), following his dismissal in June 2025.
Mr O’Donnell said allegations raised in a protected disclosure against him were designed to pressure him into ending his pursuit of what he called “significant theft and fraud” in the organisation.
He says he was subject to harassment and leaks to the media of what he says were “untrue” and “very damaging” allegations about him – as well as “interference by numerous political actors up to a very high level”.
His case is that he suspended a senior employee pending an investigation and also went to gardaí twice in the summer of 2022 to report his concerns.
Mr O’Donnell has said he reported to gardaí that he was being pressured to reinstate the senior employee. This included “being blackmailed” by a sitting senator with an alleged threat to make public “very damaging” allegations about him, Mr O’Donnell said.
In February 2024, he said, an independent investigation by a firm called RSM cleared him of allegations that he had inappropriately shared confidential board information.
He was also cleared of having inappropriately sanctioned the delivery of a boat to his home in Glenties, Co Donegal, using IFI resources and staff, he said.
Mr O’Donnell said the investigator’s sole finding against him on an allegation that he gave “inappropriate assistance” to an IFI employee going for interview was “without any proof whatsoever”.
The investigation failed to examine phone and email records he offered after a draft of the report was issued, he said.
While the RSM probe was continuing in January 2024, Mr O’Donnell met with Tom Barry and Seamus Neely, the two ministerial appointees who had taken over in place of the IFI board, to consider a pay increment in a performance appraisal process, Mr O’Donnell said.
He said Mr Neely told him he was “concerned with my judgment in the investigation process”, which he understood to be a reference to the alleged theft and fraud.
He said he was told the protected disclosure matter would have to be “bottomed out” before the payment of his annual increment could be considered, and that the RSM report “might not make pleasant reading”.
“At that point it was very, very clear that it was the end of the road for me,” he said.
He said he felt he was cast as a “troublemaker” for pointing out breaches of the internal process and for “hurting people”, another remark he attributed to Mr Neely.
“Within days of that, I did have a mental breakdown at home. If I need to talk about it, it’s very, very difficult, because at that point I felt absolutely on my own and couldn’t even articulate to people the frustration and anger that I felt about where the whole thing had come to,” he said.
“My employers were in step with external actors, politicians, and to some degree with the complainant,” Mr O’Donnell said, referring to the person who made the protected disclosure about him.
“I felt so isolated. I’m embarrassed and ashamed to say I was going to take my own life at the time. I very luckily didn’t do that. Those days were very dark and very, very hard,” he said.
He said he reported his state of mind to the IFI occupational health assessor, Dr Deirdre Gleeson, on 14 February 2024.
“I’ll be honest, I talked about what I’d been subjected to for a number of years. It’s quite difficult to explain to someone, you know, you talk about the harassment you were under, stuff being leaked out to the media, stuff being put in the public record, that remains in the public record that’s untrue,” he said.
“I had told her very clearly that I felt very isolated, destitute really, over the whole process. I knew that nobody was listening to what I was saying,” Mr O’Donnell said, adding that he felt IFI was “extremely negligent”.
“Having got some help from [Dr Gleeson] to process it and try to deal with it [I decided] it would be better to have the matter examined when I was fit enough to do that,” he said.
He added that he and Dr Gleeson then discussed treatment options.
“It was very, very damaging for me, the process I’d been in, the interference by numerous political actors up to a very high level; the fact my employer was following no processes or procedure,” he said.
“It had an immense impact on me personally at that point in time,” he said.
His barrister, Owen Keany BL, said that within days of the report being issued on a disputed date in February 2024, his client was served notice of disciplinary proceedings on 1 March 2024.
He instituted statutory complaints at the WRC that summer, and an attempt to resolve the dispute via mediation was not successful, the tribunal heard.
He said Dr Gleeson disclosed to him in January 2025 that IFI “made contact with her in 2024 to see if she would change part of one of her medical reports… to remove a section where she had stated my illness was work-related”.
In June 2025, the Department of the Environment triggered the termination of Mr O’Donnell’s contract on a “no-fault” basis, the WRC was told.
Mr O’Donnell argued he was entitled to return to a job at higher assistant principal officer grade, equivalent to his former job as Western River Basin Director, but was told: “You have no right to future employment with IFI.”
Mr Keany confirmed to the hearing today that his client was still seeking reinstatement as a potential remedy for unfair dismissal, as an alternative to an award of compensation.
The case os set to run for the next four week days at Lansdowne House in Dublin.
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this article, you can get confidential help and support from Samaritans by phone at 116 123, by email at jo@samaritans.ie, or in person at local branches across Ireland.
