Mr. Philip Sack:

Having in a previous career role worked for the UK Government, I know there is very often a reluctance to change the law unless one is forced to do so. We had similar issues over collective redundancies when we fought tooth and nail to change the law in the UK. I cannot say why the Government seems to be denying there is a problem. There is manifestly a problem. I had a dispute on behalf of a client which wanted to refer a dispute about confidential information where the EWC had been provided with information that was subject to a confidentiality restriction. It related to redundancies in a country where the national law in that country provided that any information received by a representative on the EWC must be shared with other local national representatives and failure to do so would be seen as anti-trade union activity which could be prosecuted against that member of the EWC. Here was a potential conflict of law between a national law, on the one hand, and EWC law, on the other hand. I looked at what could be done about this. The Act states a dispute must be brought to an arbitrator and the Government must make regulations to appoint an arbitrator. However, such a regulation had not been made, so I wrote to the Department asking what we should do. The Department wrote back asking for lots of information, which we provided. The matter did not seem to go very far. The Department then pointed out that there had to be a dispute with Irish employees. It was not with Irish employees because there was no Irish representative on the EWC. At this point, I realised we were not going to get anywhere so I decided to complain to the European Commission. That is the reason part of the infringement proceedings is to do with confidential information. I came up against a brick wall in the Department when trying to resolve this dispute.

My conclusion is that the only way anything will be done is through infringement procedures initiated by the European Commission, which, at the moment, are only on two specific issues. One is the absence of any enforcement of the obligations to do with special negotiating bodies. There is no enforcement whatsoever. One cannot enforce ones rights as an SNB. The other is to do confidential information, which I have just mentioned. These are only two issues and they are not the most important issues actually. Further infringement procedures may well be needed to force the Irish Government's hand.