John McGuirk has resigned from Gript Media. Gript Media became aware of his resignation minutes before an Irish Times journalist, who had been shown a copy of the resignation letter, emailed a number of questions to Gript.
We had no desire for this process to be conducted in public, but John’s actions, throughout this process, have left us no other choice.
Our position is as follows:
Nine weeks ago, two serious matters arose pertaining to John McGuirk’s employment.
Gript was sent material, including material Mr McGuirk himself had sent a third party, indicating that he (John) had been engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a person he managed.
Mr McGuirk had taken part in budget, and general management, discussions regarding this individual without disclosing his conflict of interest, which raised governance issues. In one instance, he lobbied for a company, in which this individual held shares, to be purchased by Gript and for this individual to be installed as the new head of the company.
Secondly, a complaint of sexual harassment was made against Mr McGuirk by a member of staff.
As a result of both matters, Mr McGuirk was immediately suspended on full pay. Our hope had been that matters could be discreetly and quickly investigated, but Mr McGuirk’s response to his suspension was to aggressively deny all allegations, to refuse to engage in any internal investigation in any way, shape, or form, and to send a stream of insulting and denigrating messages to the editorial team of Gript before engaging legal representation.
He then began to raise a series of complaints, including lodging a complaint against Gript with the Workplace Relations Commission, effectively arguing Gript had engaged in gender discrimination as he had been suspended for engaging in an inappropriate relationship whilst the other party had not been.
For the avoidance of doubt any such relationship was incidental to why John was suspended.
As a business, we were focussed on ensuring fairness for all our staff and a robust process was commenced with external investigators.
Mr McGuirk has sought to claim he was effectively fired due to editorial difference; this is clearly not a matter of editorial difference. This is an employment matter where the alleged unacceptable conduct of Mr. McGuirk, in his capacity as Editor of Gript, was brought to Gript’s attention and was to be investigated.
We would note that Mr McGuirk’s letter of resignation was received 90 minutes before a deadline which would have seen external investigations into both matters start.
Our view is that Mr McGuirk has treated this process with contempt from the start, breaking confidentiality repeatedly, and then presenting a public face suggesting he is the aggrieved party. He is not, and his behaviour during this process has been unacceptable.
We do not plan to comment any further on this matter.