Dismissed for COVID mistake

you need to brush up on your geography it takes the guts of 8 hours to get from the top of donegal to cork

it takes 2 hours to get fron one end of donegal to another (malin to bundoran !)

The largest county in Ireland is cork. It takes under 2 hours to get from one end of it to another.

Either your time are off for exaggeration purposes (to what end I don't know) or your entire story is a ruse for comment hits

Seems there's a lot missing to really judge what happened.

I'd imagine the hotel would have grounds under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 because that places very clear obligations on the employee not to endanger the workplace in general, which if you were supposed to be self-isolating pending a Covid test result, they can't really say they did by stopping off somewhere.

I can see this becoming an absolute minefield over the next few months though, along with the above increasing as people returning to the workplace, I can see huge standoffs arising between:

• employers seeking all employees be vaccinated but certain employees not wishing to do so - can you oblige an employee to be vaccinated?
• having vaccinated employees not wishing to attend the same workspace as an employee who does not wish to be vaccinated - which of your employee's rights do you protect?
• The likes of restaurants advertising that all of their staff are vaccinated to attract the cautious customers over another restaurant which doesn't have fully vaccinated staff - what does the second restaurant do to protect employees who choose not to be vaccinated whilst also avoiding a scenario of being unable to maintain sufficient footfall because of customer concern and the whole business going under, thereby impacting the lievlihoods of the employees who did vaccinate themselves?

Not much about this story makes sense, but for me the most serious aspect is that someone went in to work with cold symptoms. That is where the bigger risk factor is and the potential threat to the business. After that, you can debate the gross misconduct aspect and the level of action taken by the employer, but it was certainly a risky thing to do.

tallaght to swords with out a car with some walking?

Your friend was foolish and irresponsible on two counts (going to work with symptoms, and stopping at a public premises for lunch), in an industry that is on its knees, and relies heavily on word of mouth/good reviews.

I’m not at all surprised that she was fired. It doesn’t sound like the hotel followed proper procedures in firing her, but being there for such a short time I can’t imagine that she’ll have much chance of succeeding in any claim (if that’s how her mind is working).

Fuelling up the car takes all of 2-3 minutes, you're indoors for all of a minute and (should be) masked at all times. About the only thing you touch is the fuel nozzle.

Having a sit down meal, where you're likely going to be there for the guts of half an hour at least, your mask will be off for the vast majority of that time since you're eating, you'll be making close contact with your face and then you're probably going to go indoors to use the toilet where you'll be making contact with a large number of surfaces is not in any way comparable to fuelling up the car.