Ms Esther Lynch:

I will take up this point because it is one of the issues very much in play at the moment, the question of whether the hearings should be in private or public. The Rights Commissioner hearings at the moment are all in private. There is a good reason for that. In many of these cases we want to maintain the relationship between the employer and employee which is an ongoing relationship. The type of approach there should involve mediation and getting to an agreed solution, exactly the type of thing about which we have been talking. There is a strong argument that this happens better in a private rather than a public, adversarial arrangement. All appeals should be in public.

The big change we have seen in recent years is Google. It used to be that if one took a case against one’s employer that information would not go very far and would not appear on every search that every employer in the future did on one. No matter whether the person wins or loses a case an employer will say the person is trouble and will not want to employ him or her. There are new developments and existing practices, both of which happen in private. It is essential that the first instance body remains private rather than public as many are suggesting.