Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 September 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

General Scheme of the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Bill 2021: Discussion

Ms Julie Grace:

That is an excellent question. It needs a very clear definition and to be very clearly identified. The Minister, being the corporate soul, is not, I suppose, personally responsible. I imagine and suspect - it happened in my case - that that thing goes on to the next Minister in that role. Let us say it is the Minister for fisheries, although we do not have one, then it will stay with whoever comes into that ministerial role because the Minister, in accepting that disclosure, is not actually acting in a private capacity but as the corporate soul. It should stay with the Department or wherever to which it was originally made.

Something very important, which has not been addressed at all, is communication with the whistleblower. In my case, my stuff was all given to the local authority and I saw nothing. I was not entitled to read anything that was said about me. I got little snippets through FOIs, although I was denied the bulk of the material. The victimisation and the retaliation is something but the penalisation is very covert. In my case the retaliation was done from a distance and it often takes people a few years to find out how they have been retaliated against. In this, there is the loss that has been experienced and then the loss that is happening now, and there is a further interference with people. As happened in my story, if people further engage negatively with their employment there should be some mechanism there to come back. I go back again to the perpetrators. It should be pinned on that action.

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