A witness due to give evidence on behalf of a fisheries officer in an employment case against Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) is now afraid to take part due to intimidation by the State agency, a Workplace Relations Commission hearing has been told. On Thursday, at the start of the second module of a case brought by James Doherty, his counsel, Ciaran Elders, said that in early May IFI had sent emails to a number of staff who had turned up to testify at hearings in late April on behalf of his client but who had not yet been called.He said IFI had maintained the staff had not received the proper clearances to attend the previous hearings held in Letterkenny six weeks ago. Elders said the staff concerned had also not received subsistence allowance payments for April. “One witness [out of a group of four scheduled to take part] has pulled out.” “One witness is afraid to give evidence,” Elders told WRC adjudicator Shay Henry. He said the potential witness did not want any potential backlash. Other staff members who were planning to give evidence on behalf of Doherty were taking annual leave days to do so, Elders said.Counsel for IFI Tiernan Lowry said there was “absolutely no substance whatsoever” to any contention that it engaged in witness intimidation. He said IFI had no issue about releasing witnesses. He said the emails were entirely appropriate operational arrangements to ensure there were sufficient staffing levels on the ground. He said if everyone who wanted to take part had attended the hearing there would be, for example, no team on duty in Ballyshannon. “We have a State agency to run”, he said. Lowry said the staff had been verbally assured on June 4th that the subsistence payments would be made.Doherty, an assistant fisheries inspector from Buncrana in Co Donegal, in his case has claimed he was penalised, singled out and ostracised after he submitted protected disclosures to former minister for the environment Eamon Ryan and to his own senior management. The protected disclosures regarded a controversy involving more than a dozen officially hired vehicles that had been assigned to staff without insurance cover.Doherty had been involved in a crash in August 2021 while driving one of the uninsured IFI vehicles.Resuming direct evidence at a hearing in Sligo on Thursday, Doherty said that shortly after he made the protected disclosures he had been the subject of an internal investigation into a complaint that he had deployed covert cameras in a location in Donegal in breach of IFI policy. He said a superior had directed that the cameras be put in place and other two staff had installed them, but only he had faced an investigation.The hearing continues on Friday.