Mick Clifford: Bizarre sick note case drags on while siblings live under cloud for 11 years
The use of sick notes in the workplace has long been a matter of controversy. Media investigations over the years have shown some doctors are willing to provide a patient with a sick note on the flimsiest of bases.
The Margiotta case, however, is of a completely different order.
Siblings Tony, a doctor, and Lynn Margiotta were accused of conspiring to produce fake sick certs to facilitate Lynn being absent from work with An Garda Síochána, where she was employed in a civilian role. They were subjected to a lengthy criminal investigation and a trial in the Circuit Criminal Court before the whole case collapsed.
There are some highly unusual features to the case, and 11 years later a cloud still hangs over both of them. Lynn is well advanced in suing the State, and as reported today, Tony has now initiated his own legal action. Tony Margiotta has also been the subject of a lengthy investigation by the Medical Council to examine whether he has professional questions to answer.
Their problems arose in 2014. In January of that year, their mother died. Lynn had a particularly difficult bereavement in the first half of the year, leading to a number of absences from work.
“Nothing in life prepares you for the death of a parent. My mom died very suddenly in hospital and I was there,” she later told gardaí.
She was absent from work, based in Store Street Garda Station in Dublin, on approximately twelve occasions in the first half of the year. At one point, she was diagnosed as having a depressive illness.
In July of that year, she made a workplace complaint of bullying against a serving garda. Such complaints are not unusual in most workplaces at some point or another. Usually, the matter is investigated by either a HR department or an outside consultant hired for the job.
Two weeks after she lodged the complaint, but before any investigation was initiated, she was arrested. It happened one morning when she opened the door of her apartment in Navan, Co Meath. Three colleagues, all of whom she knew from work, told her she was under arrest.
They took her to a station and questioned her about sick notes she had presented for her absences over the previous six months. It was highly unusual any criminal investigation would be conducted by colleagues from the same station, even though Margiotta was a civilian employee.
The allegation was the notes were not properly procured. Much later, when the matter finally got to court, a superintendent would testify he did believe she was sick when the notes were presented, but the issue was the procurement of the notes. It would also be much later before Lynn Margiotta would discover there was no investigation into her bullying complaint.
The doctor's certs, or sick notes, were signed by Tony, who was working in a medical centre in Swords, where Lynn had previously attended. He also worked as a locum in a practice in Ratoath, Co Meath, from where he also signed certs. These certs had the stamp of other doctors who worked, or had worked, full-time in the two practices.
Colin Bradley, a professor of general practice at University College Cork (UCC), stated to gardaí it was not unusual for locums to use another doctor’s stamp while filling out sick certs. The practice, he said, was unregulated.
In June 2017, the siblings were arrested and brought to court to be charged with seven counts of using a medical document as a “false instrument”. The day of the arraignment was a Saturday.
In a case such as this, particularly one that had begun three years previously, and with no risk of a flight from the jurisdiction, it is highly unusual for a defendant to be charged on a Saturday.
The trail began nearly two years later again, in March 2019. After some initial evidence and a few days of legal argument, Judge Patricia Ryan instructed the jury to find the pair not guilty. She found Lynn Margiotta’s rights had been breached. Despite a lengthy, and presumably thorough, investigation, which must have required considerable resources, the case was not fit to advance before a jury.
Lynn Margiotta began a legal action against the gardaí soon after. That has advanced extremely slowly, but the understands it is moving onto a phase that might lead to a conclusion.
After the trial, the Medical Council began to investigate whether Tony Margiotta should face a fitness to practise hearing. One of the gardaí on the case had been in frequent contact with the council throughout the investigation and after the trial had concluded.
The Medical Council process is still in train six years later. If, for instance, there was any suggestion Dr Margiotta was unfit to practise and therefore a danger to the public, the snail’s pace of the process suggests a cavalier attitude to public safety.
By any standards, the case is bizarre from the outside, but a long-running farrago for the siblings at the centre of it. Eleven years after it all began, neither had been deemed to have transgressed in any manner, yet a cloud still hangs over their respective careers and lives.
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