Mr. Séamus Clarke:

The first point I will make is that, in fact, Article 22 of the directive simply states that "Member States could decide to provide that reports concerning interpersonal grievances exclusively affecting the reporting person" could be excluded, so there is no mandatory obligation on the Legislature to include interpersonal grievances at all as something to be excluded. I agree with the Deputy, however, that sometimes in employment law grievances can overlap with disclosures of wrongdoing. For example, somebody could have had a previous grievance or may have a protected disclosure that has newly come to light to him or her and may try to bring it in as part of his or her interpersonal grievance. We have a concern that employers might attempt to shoehorn what is effectively a protected disclosure into a grievance procedure and, therefore, the protected disclosure may not come to light. We think, therefore, that if the Legislature decides to include interpersonal grievances, which is within its discretion, this would need to be defined very tightly in order that it would cover merely a clear interpersonal grievance between one person who is a worker and another worker and that it would not have any sort of tailing into a protected disclosure. Obviously, the spirit of this regime is to encourage reporting. We would not want to have anything that might discourage that at all, particularly in the case of somebody who, as I said, may be involved in a long-standing interpersonal grievance but has new issues to bring to light.

The Deputy gave a good example. One could think of a situation whereby somebody raises a grievance in respect of bonuses or expense claims. That may feed into some sort of financial impropriety. It is important that an employer could be able to not use interpersonal grievances to avoid dealing with bigger issue.