AN INVESTIGATION INTO a metal-bar training practice associated with Horse Sport Ireland’s eventing High Performance director Sally Corscadden found that the coach did not breach her terms of employment by permitting the practice in question.
However, Justice Frank Clarke recommended that Corscadden receive a “written final warning” for failing to disclose to Horse Sport Ireland (HSI) that the metal-bar practice was in place during a previous investigation into related training methods.
Justice Clarke had been asked by Horse Sport Ireland to investigate whether the metal-bar training practice constituted ‘rapping’, which is against Federation Equestre Internationale (FEI) training rules and, by extension, could have left Corscadden in breach of her terms of employment as Irish eventing’s High Performance director.
A previous investigation by Susan Ahern BL had found that the practice — which involved placing an aluminium bar on the top of the uppermost pole of a standard showjumping fence — did not amount to rapping because the bar was slanted away from the horse approaching the fence.
In the conclusions to his own report, Justice Clarke said that the “central substantive finding” of his investigation was “not truly to the effect that the metal bar training technique did not amount to rapping but rather that it was insufficiently clear that it did amount to rapping to justify a finding of a breach by Ms Corscadden of her contractual obligations to HSI.”
“It is important to emphasise that the Substantive Report concluded that the evidence that the practice would cause unnecessary pain or discomfort to a horse was inconclusive,” Justice Clarke noted.
“I am not of the view that Ms Corscadden can be held to have been in breach of her contract of employment with HSI by reason of permitting breaches of FEI rules to take place during training over which she had general control.”
Justice Clarke added, however, that in his view, the coach “was in breach of her contract of employment by not drawing the attention of HSI to the fact that the metal-bar training practice was also in use when an investigation into not entirely dissimilar training methods was in train.
Justice Clarke added that “failing to mention that there was another, not dissimilar, training practice employed was… a breach of the obligation of confidence and trust, most particularly having regard to the highly responsible nature of Ms Corscadden’s position and the potential for reputational damage to HSI in all the circumstances of the case.”
This was not “at the upper end of the range of breaches of the obligation of trust and confidence,” Justice Clarke found.
He recommended that “the appropriate sanction to be imposed would be a written final warning to the effect that any further material breach of the duty of trust and confidence could well result in dismissal.”
