An ESB worker is out of time to pursue a pay claim seeking €42,000 he alleged was due as overtime – a figure management at the utility said was “exaggerated”, a tribunal has ruled.The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has concluded that training officer Peter Lavelle was too late to pursue a complaint against ESB Networks DAC under the Payment of Wages Act 1997 challenging a 2023 pay policy change at the utility. Lavelle’s trade union, Connect, submitted that he was left short by €42,000 between November 2023 and July 2025 because of a “unilateral” decision to stop paying overtime for time spent on the road. After eight years’ service as a network engineer based in Wilton, Cork City, Lavelle was promoted in 2022 to a new job with duties at a company training centre in Portlaoise, the tribunal heard. For his first two years in the post, he received overtime for travel to Portlaoise and other training sites, with management approval. Historically, he said, “any travel away from a normal place of work” was paid as overtime. This changed in November 2023, when overtime payments for travel time were stopped and there were also changes to subsistence arrangements, he said. Will the State’s plan for the Carlton Cinema site revitalise O’Connell Street? Listen | 25:33“I wouldn’t have taken the job if I knew that was going to happen,” Lavelle said. He said he faced “significant” levels of travel daily from Cork to Portlaoise, setting out from home at 6am and not returning until “late in the evening”. “It’s not a commute. It is a business journey,” he said. Claire Purcell, an ESB employee relations officer, said travel-related overtime payments had been “an incorrect practice” which had developed. “The reality is that the figures claimed by the complainant are exaggerated,” Ms Purcell said. Lavelle received €5,927 for 116.5 hours’ overtime and 178 overnight allowances worth €26,048 in 2022, she said. He was paid a further €3,862 for 72 hours’ overtime and 200 overnight allowances worth €29,253 in 2023, she added. The overnight arrangements “significantly reduced” the need for Lavelle to travel, the witness said. Lavelle was still receiving mileage expenses, and there was also a €5,000 annually allowance granted to training officers in the spring of 2024, backdated to the previous November, she added. “When we were paying overtime for travel time it was nowhere near the amount that we’re seeing here today,” she added. Caroline Doyle, appearing instructed by the ESB’s legal department, argued Lavelle was too late to pursue a complaint in July 2025 seeking to challenge a decision taken in November 2023. Darren Erangey of the Connect trade union, for Lavelle, argued the breach was ongoing. Adjudication officer Thomas O’Driscoll ruled in a decision published on Tuesday that the complaint was out of time and therefore outside his jurisdiction.He noted the “clear and unambiguous evidence” of Keith Kavanagh, a technical training manager, that the ESB made and communicated a decision to stop overtime for travelling in November 2023. He did not consider ongoing alleged financial losses to amount to a continuing breach, and ruled that Lavelle’s recourse to the internal grievance process could not extend the time limit. Lavelle’s complaint of July 2025 was “well outside the statutory time limit”, even if an extension from six months to 12 could be granted for reasonable circumstances justifying a delay, which were not established, he wrote. “The complaint is out of time and that I do not have jurisdiction to entertain it,” O’Driscoll concluded.