A warehouse worker claims he was forced to quit his job because a HR manager “lied blatantly” to his face about an alleged commitment to require staff to speak English only at work. Anthony Blount. who claims he was constructively dismissed by his former employer, Pharmed Ltd, was giving evidence to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC). Blount said a policy that only English would be spoken on the shop floor had been an agreed precondition for his return from sick leave at the pharmacy goods distributor in September 2024, after he accused a group of Lithuanian colleagues of bullying and isolating him at work. “It seemed like my whole agreement changed that day on my return to work… they turned around and said they weren’t going to enforce the girls speaking English,” Blount told the hearing on Thursday. Pharmed Ltd is contesting Blount’s complaint.. Blount joined the company in the summer of 2023 and worked with four other warehouse operatives – three Lithuanian women and a Ukrainian man – a team leader who was Irish and a woman warehouse manager, who was also Lithuanian. Blount said he believed the women were “passive-aggressive” towards him and that he considered it “a form of bullying”. “[They] never once talk in English unless they’re talking to [the Irish team lead]. They made sure I was isolated,” he said. He said he was subject to accusations about “aggression” and having “anger issues” from the women, which he rejected. He took medical leave due to “stress from the work environment” on September 16th, 2024. During a formal return-to-work meeting with his team leader and a company HR officer, Shirley Kiernan, Blount said there was a commitment from the company that it would be “English on the floor at all times” except for “translation” to accommodate one of the workers. However, when the operations manager and the team leader met him on September 30th, 2024, “they turned around and said they weren’t going to enforce the girls speaking English.” On his return, he said his colleagues “spoke Lithuanian all day” and “didn’t speak a word to me”. The following day, he went back on sick leave and never returned to the workplace, he confirmed to adjudication officer, Penelope McGrath. The company brought in an external investigator to address a formal grievance by Blount, which, Blount said, blamed him for his colleagues’ alleged behaviour. He appealed the outcome, calling the investigation “flawed and inadequate”. A meeting on the grievance appeal was held in June 2025 with company director Dara Murphy and Kiernan, Blount said. “I asked Shirley about the agreement [to return to work]. She denied this ever happened. She point blank lied to my face that there was the agreement we’d spoken about, the English policy,” Blount said. “She said they could not have agreed to that because they got a consultant in that said they couldn’t implement it,” Blount added.He resigned that month before the appeal outcome was given, he added. McGrath said she would ask Kiernan about her consideration of an English-only policy when the matter resumed, but said: “I get that you can’t have a workplace where you’re denying individuals the ability to speak in their native tongue.”She adjourned the matter to a later date to be set by the WRC.