High Court injunctions in employment disputes

By Adam McCarthy · 4 November 2026

An Irish employee who believes a dismissal is unfair ordinarily goes to the Workplace Relations Commission. A smaller number go to the High Court instead, and ask it to stop the dismissal before it takes effect. The employment injunction, as it has come to be called, has been part of Irish practice for forty years and is used far more readily here than its counterpart in England. It is a remedy for breach of contract rather than for unfairness, it is granted on affidavit within weeks, and it can preserve a salary, a reputation and a bargaining position that would otherwise be lost. It is also expensive, exacting in what it requires the applicant to show, and refused more often than it is granted. The same jurisdiction serves employers who need to stop a senior executive joining a competitor or taking confidential information with them. This article explains the tests the court applies, the kinds of case in which it intervenes, the orders it is prepared to make, and the practical considerations on both sides.

Why the High Court and not the Workplace Relations Commission

Most dismissal disputes in Ireland are decided by an adjudication officer of the Workplace Relations Commission under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977. That route is inexpensive, informal and, for most employees, adequate. It has limits. The adjudication officer can act only after the dismissal has taken effect, the hearing comes months later, compensation is ordinarily capped at two years' remuneration, and although reinstatement and re-engagement are available they are rarely ordered.¹ For a senior executive whose package runs to several hundred thousand euro a year, whose share options depend on leaving as a good leaver, or whose dismissal for misconduct would follow them through a regulated profession for the rest of their career, the statutory remedy can be no remedy at all.

The High Court's jurisdiction is different in kind. It rests on the contract of employment and on the court's equitable power to restrain a breach of it pending trial. The employee issues proceedings seeking a declaration that the purported dismissal is invalid, together with damages, and asks the court in the meantime to preserve the position. The court does not ask whether the dismissal was fair in the statutory sense. It asks whether the employer is acting in breach of the contract, express or implied, and whether the balance of justice requires that it be stopped until the question can be tried. The two routes are alternatives rather than supplements. Section 15 of the 1977 Act bars a claim under the Act once the hearing of a common law action for wrongful dismissal has begun, and bars the common law action once an adjudication officer has decided the statutory claim, so an employee may set out on both roads but can reach the end of only one.²

The court also refuses to let the common law be used to obtain what the Oireachtas has reserved to the statutory bodies. In Nolan v Emo Oil Services in 2009 Laffoy J held that a complaint of unfair selection for redundancy is a creature of statute with no counterpart in contract, and in Kearney v Byrne Wallace in 2017 Baker J refused an injunction to a solicitor made redundant by his firm, holding that his claim was statutory in origin and that the declaratory and contractual reliefs attached to it could not supply the strong case the application required. The Court of Appeal agreed.³ The same line was drawn in May 2026 in Murphy v ION Trading Ireland, where Jordan J refused an application by an in-house lawyer who said she had been constructively dismissed and sought an order restoring her salary and benefits. An employee who swears that she has resigned cannot at the same time claim to be paid under the contract she says she has brought to an end, and questions of constructive dismissal belong to the Workplace Relations Commission under the 1977 Act, as interim relief for alleged penalisation of a whistleblower belongs to the Circuit Court under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014. The judge declined to provide, as he put it, equivalent outcomes through the guise of the common law, described the application as devoid of merit, and drew attention to the practice direction on litigation restriction orders.⁴

The test the court applies

Every interlocutory injunction in Ireland starts from Campus Oil, the Supreme Court's adoption in 1983 of the approach in American Cyanamid. The applicant must show a fair question to be tried, the court then asks whether damages would be an adequate remedy for either side, and if they would not it weighs the balance of convenience. In Merck Sharp & Dohme v Clonmel Healthcare in 2019 the Supreme Court, in a judgment of O'Donnell J, restated the test. The court first asks whether a fair question has been raised and then asks how matters can best be arranged pending the trial, which the judgment calls the balance of justice. The adequacy of damages is part of that enquiry and often the most important part of it, but it is not a preliminary hurdle, and the apparent strength of the applicant's case may be weighed in the balance. The whole exercise is to be approached flexibly, with the object of minimising the risk of injustice, and not as a checklist to be ticked off in order.⁵

Employment cases carry a further requirement. An order that an employer must continue to treat a person as employed and to pay them is mandatory in substance however it is phrased, and the courts have always been reluctant to compel performance of a contract of personal service. In Maha Lingam v Health Service Executive in 2005 the Supreme Court, in a judgment of Fennelly J, held that an employee seeking such an order must show a strong case that is likely to succeed at the hearing of the action, and not merely a fair question.⁶ In Clare County Council v McDonagh in 2022 Hogan J described the standard for mandatory interlocutory relief as a particularly strong and powerful case, and warned that an interlocutory injunction must not be allowed to become a route to summary judgment.⁷ A strong case does not mean a certain one. In Mason v ILTB in 2021 Butler J explained that the applicant must show that they will probably succeed at trial, not that they will certainly do so, and the applicant need not show that an injunction is the remedy they would obtain at trial.⁸ In practical terms the employee must point to a clear contractual entitlement, whether a procedure written into the contract, a handbook incorporated by reference, or the term the law implies, and show on the documents that the employer has plainly departed from it.

Restraining a dismissal

The modern employment injunction is usually traced to Fennelly v Assicurazioni Generali in 1985, in which Costello J ordered an employer that had dismissed a senior employee without the notice his contract required to go on paying his salary pending the trial, while declining to order that he be given work.⁹ That shape has endured. The court will restrain an employer from acting on a dismissal and will require it to continue paying salary and benefits, but it will not oblige the employer to provide work or to admit the employee to the premises, and it will almost never order that a person already removed be put back. Clarke J's judgments in Carroll v Bus Átha Cliath and Bergin v Galway Clinic Doughiska settled the modern approach, including the relevance of whether the relationship of trust and confidence has survived and the court's unwillingness to force an unwilling employer to keep a senior figure at the head of its business.¹⁰

The second thing to understand is that at common law an employer may dismiss on proper notice for any reason or for none. The Supreme Court confirmed in Sheehy v Ryan in 2008 that there is no implied term of permanent employment, and an employee dismissed on the notice the contract provides has no complaint in contract however unfair the decision might be found to be under the statute.¹¹ The injunction therefore bites only where the dismissal is itself a breach of contract, and in practice that means one of two situations. The first is where the employer has not followed a procedure that the contract prescribes. The second is where the employer dismisses for misconduct, because the courts imply into every contract of employment a term that an employee will not be dismissed for misconduct without fair procedures, and an employer cannot contract out of that term by labelling the dismissal as something else.

The distinction between performance and misconduct has decided most of the recent cases. In O'Donovan v Over-C Technology a chief financial officer dismissed for poor performance during his six month probation persuaded the High Court that he had a strong case for an implied right to fair procedures in the assessment of his performance, and obtained an order restraining the dismissal and six months' salary. The Court of Appeal allowed the appeal in February 2021. During probation both parties are free to end the contract for no reason, implying a right to fair procedures into an assessment of performance would negate the whole purpose of a probationary period, and fair procedures are required only where misconduct is the reason for the dismissal. The court vacated the order and awarded costs against the employee.¹² In Buttimer v Oak Fuel Supermarket in 2023 the High Court found a strong case that a store manager dismissed during probation had in truth been dismissed for the misconduct alleged against her by a colleague, and that a contract purporting to exclude the disciplinary procedure during probation could not remove the obligation of fair procedures. Even so, the court held that her loss was readily calculable, that an injunction would do little to repair any damage to her reputation, that it would be unfair to require the employer to pay her until trial, and that trust between the parties had gone. Of the six orders she sought she obtained two, restraining the employer from appointing a replacement and from telling anyone that she had left.¹³ In Nolan v Science Foundation Ireland in June 2024 the director general of the agency, dismissed by its board under a clause allowing termination without cause, failed to show a strong case that misconduct was the real reason. The court held that it is the reason for a dismissal, and not its effect on the employee's reputation, that triggers the right to fair procedures, and that an order returning him to work would have amounted to the court micro managing the employment.¹⁴

Where the employer has dismissed for misconduct and the process was flawed, the court acts. In Giblin v Irish Life and Permanent in 2010 Laffoy J restrained the summary dismissal of a branch manager of thirty years' standing, finding a strong case that he had been denied fair procedures and the contractual appeal to which he was entitled, that damages would not repair the harm to his reputation, and that he should be placed on special leave on full pay under the bank's own procedures until the trial.¹⁵ In July 2023 Mulcahy J, in a case in which the parties could not be identified by order of the court, found a strong case that an employer which had dismissed a long serving employee for gross misconduct had failed to follow a disciplinary procedure by which it was bound, ordered that her salary and bonuses continue, restrained any further step in the process, and left the employer free to suspend her on full pay in the meantime.¹⁶ The same judge refused relief later the same year in Campbell v Irish Prison Service, where a recruit prison officer had been dismissed after a disciplinary process that followed the applicable circular. Compliance with the contractual procedure, he held, is at the very least a strong indicator that fair procedures have been afforded, and an employee who has had the benefit of it must point to something out of the ordinary that made it inadequate.¹⁷

Damages are the quiet decider in many of these cases. An employee's loss is salary, which is calculable, and the courts have said so repeatedly. What tips the balance is usually the character of the dismissal. A dismissal for misconduct carries a stigma that money does not remove, and the court is more willing to hold the position where the employee's good name and professional future are at stake and where the employer has conspicuously departed from its own rules. Even then the order will be the least intrusive that does justice, which in practice means salary without work, a halt to the process rather than a declaration about its outcome, and a direction that leaves the employer free to run its business.

Suspensions, investigations and the disciplinary process

Most applications now arrive before any dismissal, when an employee has been suspended or an investigation has begun. The starting point is Mooney v An Post, in which the Supreme Court held in 1998 that the content of fair procedures in employment depends on the terms of the contract and the circumstances of the case, and that at a minimum the employee must know the case against them and be given a chance to answer it.¹⁸ The limiting principle is Rowland v An Post, decided by the Supreme Court in March 2017. Clarke J held that a court should not intervene in a disciplinary process that is still under way unless it is sufficiently clear that the process has gone irremediably wrong, because the point of a process is that errors can be corrected as it proceeds, and the sub postmaster who had gone to court while the matter was still at an investigative stage had gone too early.¹⁹ The Supreme Court returned to the point in McKelvey v Iarnród Éireann in November 2019. A court may stop a process at the interlocutory stage only where something has occurred that cannot be cured, so that there is no realistic prospect of a legally sustainable outcome, and speculation that it might go wrong is not enough. On the particular question in that case the court held that legal representation in a workplace disciplinary process is required only in exceptional circumstances, assessed by reference to the factors identified in Burns v Governor of Castlerea Prison, which are the seriousness of the charge and of the potential penalty, whether points of law are likely to arise, the capacity of the employee to present their own case, the procedural difficulty involved and the need for a reasonably speedy decision. The Court of Appeal in the same case had already declined to follow Lyons v Longford Westmeath Education and Training Board insofar as it suggested a general entitlement to lawyers and to cross examination at the investigation stage.²⁰

Where the process has gone irremediably wrong the court does act, and the recurring grounds are predetermination, bias, an investigator appointed in breach of the contract, and a holding suspension that drifts on without progress. Mason v ILTB is the clearest recent example. The managing director of a stockbroking firm was accused by its chairman of fraud and theft over a bonus payment, without being asked for an explanation, and was told the matter would be reported to the Central Bank and the Gardaí. A letter from the company's solicitors then described the payment as improper, irregular, unauthorised and unlawful. When the board resolved to investigate and to suspend him, Butler J found a strong case that the company had already decided that his conduct was wrongful, so that the investigation would be a formality designed to support a conclusion already reached, restrained the investigation and the suspension, and directed that he be allowed to return to work and be paid pending trial.²¹ The distinction between an investigation and a disciplinary hearing matters here. Clarke J explained in Minnock v Irish Casing Company in 2007 that a pure fact gathering exercise which makes no findings attracts no requirement of natural justice and is not a matter for the court, whereas an inquiry that can make findings against the employee must observe fair procedures, and an investigator who purports to make findings has crossed into the territory where the court may intervene.²²

Suspension has its own law. In O'Sullivan v Health Service Executive in May 2023 the Supreme Court, by a majority of four to one in a judgment of Dunne J, restored the administrative leave of a consultant whose suspension the Court of Appeal had found unlawful. Where a contract confers a power to suspend on a stated ground, the question for the court is whether the power was exercised in good faith and whether the decision was arbitrary, capricious or irrational, not whether the court would have reached the same decision, although a suspension must be reconsidered if new information removes its basis. O'Donnell CJ, concurring, stressed the damage that a suspension does to reputation and endorsed the view expressed by Noonan J in Bank of Ireland v Reilly that fairness requires at least a rudimentary explanation of the reason for it.²³ An employer that suspends without explanation, without considering whether suspension is necessary, or for longer than the investigation justifies, hands the employee the material for an application.

Protecting the employer's business

The jurisdiction runs in the other direction too, and the employer's application is in some ways the easier one, because an order restraining a former employee from doing something is prohibitory and the ordinary fair question standard applies, subject to the court's awareness that an order which stops a person working has mandatory consequences for them. The usual vehicle is a post termination restrictive covenant, and the usual difficulty is that the covenant is void as a restraint of trade unless it protects a legitimate interest of the employer, which means its trade connections or its confidential information rather than its wish not to face competition, and goes no further than is reasonably necessary to protect that interest. The Irish courts have applied that test strictly. In Murgitroyd v Purdy in 2005 Clarke J held that a twelve month restriction on a patent agent competing anywhere in the State was too wide, because a restriction on dealing with the firm's existing clients would have protected everything the firm was entitled to protect, and he dismissed the claim rather than rewrite the clause.²⁴ Dunne J reached the same conclusion for the same reason in Net Affinity v Conaghan in 2011.²⁵ In Ryanair v Bellew in December 2019 Allen J refused to stop the airline's chief operations officer joining easyJet. A twelve month period was acceptable, but a restriction that prevented him working in any capacity for any airline, including the legacy carriers with which Ryanair did not compete for the same passengers, went further than the protection of its confidential information required, and the existence of a separate confidentiality clause could not save it.²⁶ The employer that does win is the one with a narrow clause, a demonstrable interest and no delay. In Creganna v Cullen in April 2024 Quinn J restrained a senior executive of a medical device company from starting work with a competitor until the trial, which was fixed for three months later, holding that damages would not be an adequate remedy and that the company had moved promptly.²⁷

Three practical lessons follow. A covenant drafted for a junior employee and never revisited on promotion will rarely survive, because reasonableness is judged at the date it was given and by reference to the role then held. A non solicitation or non dealing clause, confined to the clients the employee actually served, is far more likely to be enforced than a bare prohibition on competition, and garden leave of a defined length, during which the employee remains employed and paid but away from the business, achieves much of what a non compete is meant to achieve without the same vulnerability. Confidential information and the employee's duty of fidelity exist independently of any clause, and where an employee has taken documents or data the court will order their return and restrain their use whatever the contract says, provided the employer acts within days rather than months.

Procedure, speed and cost

An application begins with a plenary summons. Where a dismissal is about to take effect the employee may apply without notice for an interim order lasting a few days, on a grounding affidavit that must disclose everything material including what tells against the applicant, and must give an undertaking to pay any damages the employer suffers if the order turns out to have been wrongly granted. The interlocutory application that follows is heard on affidavit, usually within weeks, and cross examination is rare, so the case is decided on the contract, the handbook, the correspondence and the account each side swears to. An employee who has taken part in a process without objection will struggle to complain of it afterwards, as the Court of Appeal held in Kelleher v An Post, and one who has delayed will find the delay held against them on the balance of justice.²⁸ The court can tailor the order, as Buttimer shows, and will often grant less than is sought.

The cost is real on both sides. Interlocutory costs are now commonly dealt with at the end of the application rather than reserved, an unsuccessful applicant can expect to pay the employer's costs as Mr O'Donovan did, and the undertaking as to damages is a genuine exposure even if it is seldom called upon. Few of these cases reach trial. The order made or refused at the interlocutory stage reshapes the bargaining between the parties, and most are resolved by a negotiated exit within months. That is not a criticism of the remedy. It is the point of it.

The statutory routes remain in the background throughout. A complaint to the Workplace Relations Commission must be lodged within six months of the dismissal, and an employee who has issued High Court proceedings would be wise to lodge one in time and let it stand while the election under section 15 is made. An employee who says the dismissal is penalisation for a protected disclosure has a separate and faster remedy, an application to the Circuit Court for interim relief within twenty one days of the dismissal under the 2014 Act, which the High Court will not duplicate.²⁹

What employers and employees should take from this

For an employer the lessons are consistent across twenty years of cases. Follow the procedure in the contract and the handbook from the first day of an allegation, and if the contract says an investigator must be agreed, agree one. Keep the investigation and the disciplinary hearing separate, and keep the investigator from making findings. Do not write, or allow your solicitors to write, a letter that reaches a conclusion before the hearing. Explain a suspension, keep it under review and do not let it drift. If a termination is to be without cause, make sure that the reason is in truth performance or the needs of the business and that the contract and the notice period are honoured, because a court that senses misconduct behind a no fault letter will look through it. Draft restrictive covenants narrowly and review them on promotion, and when a senior employee leaves for a competitor, act in days.

For an employee, and particularly for an executive or a professional, the injunction is a remedy for breach of contract and not for unfairness, so the first step is to read the contract. A strong case means a clear departure from a clear entitlement, and the court will not reweigh an employer's judgment about performance. Move at once, because delay is fatal and participation without protest is almost as damaging. Expect the realistic order to be salary rather than work, and expect the court to refuse anything that looks like managing the workplace. Keep the statutory claim alive in parallel, and understand that a failed application carries the employer's costs as well as your own. Used in the right case the High Court can preserve a position that would otherwise be lost before anyone had looked at the merits. Used in the wrong case it is an expensive way to learn what the Workplace Relations Commission would have decided anyway. The firm acts for employers and for senior employees in these applications, and the work is described under Employment Law.

This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. It states the law as the author understands it in November 2026. Every application turns on the terms of the particular contract and on the evidence, and anyone contemplating an application, or facing one, should take advice without delay.

Notes

1. Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, section 7, as amended, which caps compensation at 104 weeks' remuneration and provides for reinstatement and re-engagement. ↩
2. Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, section 15, as amended by the Unfair Dismissals (Amendment) Act 1993 and the Workplace Relations Act 2015. ↩
3. Nolan v Emo Oil Services Ltd [2009] IEHC 15 (Laffoy J); Kearney v Byrne Wallace [2017] IEHC 713 (Baker J), affirmed [2019] IECA 206. ↩
4. Murphy v ION Trading Ireland Ltd [2026] IEHC 288 (Jordan J, 8 May 2026). ↩
5. Campus Oil Ltd v Minister for Industry and Energy (No. 2) [1983] IR 88; Merck Sharp and Dohme Corporation v Clonmel Healthcare Ltd [2019] IESC 65 (O'Donnell J, 31 July 2019); Buttimer v Oak Fuel Supermarket Ltd [2023] IEHC 126, applying Merck in the employment context. ↩
6. Maha Lingam v Health Service Executive [2005] IESC 89 (Fennelly J). ↩
7. Clare County Council v McDonagh [2022] IESC 2 (Hogan J, 31 January 2022). ↩
8. Mason v ILTB Ltd trading as Gillen Markets [2021] IEHC 477 (Butler J). ↩
9. Fennelly v Assicurazioni Generali SpA (1985) 3 ILTR 73 (Costello J). ↩
10. Carroll v Bus Átha Cliath [2005] 4 IR 184 (Clarke J); Bergin v Galway Clinic Doughiska Ltd [2008] 2 IR 205 (Clarke J). ↩
11. Sheehy v Ryan [2008] IESC 14. ↩
12. O'Donovan v Over-C Technology Ltd [2021] IECA 37 (16 February 2021), reversing the order of the High Court of 12 June 2020. ↩
13. Buttimer v Oak Fuel Supermarket Ltd trading as Costcutter Rathcormac [2023] IEHC 126. ↩
14. Nolan v Science Foundation Ireland [2024] IEHC 368. ↩
15. Giblin v Irish Life and Permanent plc [2010] IEHC 36 (Laffoy J, 10 February 2010). ↩
16. High Court, Mulcahy J, 24 July 2023, the parties anonymised by order under section 27 of the Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2008. ↩
17. Campbell v Irish Prison Service [2023] IEHC 706 (Mulcahy J). ↩
18. Mooney v An Post [1998] 4 IR 288. ↩
19. Rowland v An Post [2017] IESC 20, [2017] 1 IR 355 (Clarke J, 27 March 2017). ↩
20. McKelvey v Iarnród Éireann [2019] IESC 79 (Clarke CJ, 11 November 2019); Iarnród Éireann v McKelvey [2018] IECA 346 (Irvine J); Burns v Governor of Castlerea Prison [2009] IESC 33; Lyons v Longford Westmeath Education and Training Board [2017] IEHC 272. ↩
21. Mason v ILTB Ltd trading as Gillen Markets [2021] IEHC 477 (Butler J). ↩
22. Minnock v Irish Casing Company Ltd (High Court, Clarke J, 24 May 2007). ↩
23. O'Sullivan v Health Service Executive [2023] IESC 11 (Dunne J for the majority, O'Donnell CJ concurring, 10 May 2023); Bank of Ireland v Reilly [2015] IEHC 241 (Noonan J). ↩
24. Murgitroyd and Company Ltd v Purdy [2005] IEHC 159, [2005] 3 IR 12 (Clarke J, 1 June 2005). ↩
25. Net Affinity Ltd v Conaghan [2011] IEHC 160 (Dunne J). ↩
26. Ryanair DAC v Bellew [2019] IEHC 907 (Allen J). ↩
27. Creganna Ltd v Cullen and Lake Region Medical Ltd [2024] IEHC 231 (Quinn J, 23 April 2024). ↩
28. Kelleher v An Post [2016] IECA 195. ↩
29. Protected Disclosures Act 2014, section 11 and Schedule 1, as amended by the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Act 2022; Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, section 8, as amended, on the time for lodging a complaint. ↩