Mr. Philip Brennan:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for the opportunity to contribute to the pre-legislative debate on the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Bill 2021. Raiseaconcern is a small Irish-owned, Irish-based professional organisation that works with private sector employers and public bodies in the prevention, detection, investigation and remediation of workplace wrongdoing. As our name suggests, we specialise in the area of whistleblowing, or employee disclosure, as we prefer to call it. We have practical experience of dealing with employers and workers in this area.

Committee members will appreciate that the content of our work, who we work for and the identity of the disclosers we engage with is extremely confidential, so they will understand why I will not be in a position to discuss specific cases with them. However, as the committee considers and debates the first set of amendments to the Protected Disclosures Act since its enactment in 2014, I welcome the opportunity to share some views with the committee and to take questions.

Many elements of the adoption of the EU whistleblowing directive into Irish law are non-discretionary, so my submission only covers those limited areas where there is discretion under the directive or where members have general discretion as legislators to go beyond the provisions of the directive. In all, we make four recommendations on the general scheme of the Bill. The first relates to grievances, which is dealt with in head 5 of the general scheme.