Ms Audrey Cahill:

I thank the committee for the invitation to appear before it and for the opportunity to outline the important work of the Workplace Relations Commission, its statutory functions and, in particular, how the WRC is supporting and assisting people with disabilities to access WRC services to assist them in realising their rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in particular Article 27 on the right to work and employment.

I was newly appointed as Director General of the WRC this February. I am accompanied by officials of the WRC: Ms Derval Monahan, director of corporate services, and Ms Gwendolen Morgan, director of legal.

As the committee will be aware, the WRC plays an invaluable role in Irish society by delivering its core services in a fair, consistent and independent manner. It interacts with people and businesses in many ways. Its services help to maintain industrial relations stability nationally; mediate and adjudicate in individual disputes; raise awareness of and improve industrial and employment relations generally; promote, monitor and enforce compliance with employment standards; and provide recourse for people who feel they have been discriminated against in the delivery of services more generally.

In order to deliver our services, the commission has five fully accessible offices, located in Dublin, Cork, Ennis, Sligo and Carlow. Following significant investment in recent years, the full range of commission services are available in each location. For example, the hearing loop system for those with hearing impairments is available at all of our sites and each office can facilitate physical and virtual hearings. Remote or hybrid hearings have proven to be an effective accommodation for some service users, depending on their individual needs. Others prefer face-to-face engagement, and this, too, is accommodated.

The commission has a staffing complement of over 215 full-time equivalent civil servants, who are employees of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. These resources are supplemented by a further 42 external adjudication officers. The adjudication service investigates the disputes, grievances and claims that individuals or groups of workers make under the employment legislation listed in Schedule 5 of the Workplace Relations Act 2015 and under the equality legislation, including the Equal Status Acts, Employment Equality Acts and a range of other employment statutes. All decisions are published on the WRC website and many are reported in the media.

Of last year's 6,263 cases, comprising 12,000 complaints submitted, 13% fell within the equality law sphere encompassing service providers. The legal team provides regular guidance and training to our adjudication officers on equality law matters and related themes, such as unconscious bias, reasonable accommodations, mental health issues and the Equal Treatment Bench Book. We have also published a number of guidance documents to simplify adjudications, including a guide to evidence for lay litigants, witness guidelines and the oath or affirmation translated into ten languages. The legal team regularly participates in EU training to ensure that the adjudication division is aware of emerging trends and the latest jurisprudence in the area of equality and disability rights.

The inspectorate of the WRC conducts workplace inspections to ensure employers’ compliance with employment law in the State, with some 8,670 employers inspected in 2022 and 2023. The commission’s information and customer service unit provides information to employees, employers and citizens generally. For the committee’s information, we have set out some data points in our detailed submission. The commission offers mediation in individual disputes in person and-or by phone or video conference, depending on the nature of the matter or the parties’ needs. Our mediation services are delivered in person by default, with any reasonable accommodations or requests for virtual mediation activated where needed.

The commission works with trade unions, employer bodies and equality and other stakeholders in publishing codes of practice. This year, the WRC published the code of practice on the right to request remote working and the right to request flexible working, which includes a number of equality considerations at its core. By way of example, in consideration of a request for remote or other form of flexible working, an employee’s disabilities or his or her caring responsibilities for a disabled person may be at issue. One of the aims of the underpinning legislation is to increase participation in the labour market for those with disabilities and caring responsibilities.

In its invitation, the committee indicated that it would be considering how the commission supported the development of equal opportunities for people with disabilities in employment. With the committee's permission, I would like to outline some of the supports provided by the WRC.

Employment equality legislation not only prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities across all forms of employment, but also imposes obligations on employers to provide reasonable accommodation to persons with disabilities. Additional legal obligations are placed on the public sector under the Disability Act 2005, including a minimum requirement that 4.5% of employees be persons with disabilities. While its HR function and associated tasks, such as recruitment, lie with the parent Department, the commission plays a key role in providing supports to its own staff with disabilities and a pivotal role in terms of adjudicating on cases engaging these rights as set out below.

Turning to referrals under the Equal Status Acts, the latter make it unlawful to discriminate when providing goods and services. These are not employment-related cases. In 2023, some 428 referrals, citing 733 specific grounds, were received by the adjudication service under the Equal Status Act 2000. Referrals on the ground of disability remain to be the highest received over the past three years, amounting to 23%, or 170, of the referrals received in 2023.

On referrals under the Employment Equality Acts, in 2023, 1,045 cases were referred to the WRC under the employment equality legislation, citing 1,458 specific grounds of discrimination. The majority of referrals in 2023 under this Act were under the ground of disability at 331, followed by gender at 322. However, this varies from year to year from a thematic perspective and there are not obvious trends as such.

The WRC is conscious of the need to continually upskill our staff and adapt its services to those with a wide range of disabilities. The WRC's parent Department, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, has provided staff with in-house lunch and learn training sessions on a range of topics including disability awareness, inclusive language and cultural awareness training. A specific training course on the IHREC public sector duty is also available to all our staff.

The WRC was also represented on the Department’s equality, diversity and inclusion working group to develop its new equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. In March 2023, the Department, including the WRC, which accounts of 20% of the overall Department staff, was awarded the silver investors in diversity EDI mark from the Irish Centre for Diversity. The accreditation process included an assessment of the Department’s HR and EDI related policies, initiatives, training and programmes, as well as an all-staff survey. In line with this strategy, the WRC is aligned with the Department in the process of becoming a JAM card accredited organisation. Our ambition is to continue to cascade the training this year to cover 80% of our employees internally.

As outlined in our customer service charter, the WRC has an experienced disability access officer in place who is available to assist WRC users on request. The access officer is also involved in overseeing individual accommodation requests, such as the booking of Irish Sign Language interpreters and arranging for materials to be translated into Braille using our WRC Braille printer and sent to visually impaired parties to accommodate their needs. In addition, the access officer is continuously upskilling and has completed a wide range of training courses to support their role, which relate in part or in full to accessibility and disability issues.

In addition to assisting individuals directly, the WRC website is a vital source of information and an interface with WRC service users. Since the launch of the revised website in 2019, the site has been regularly independently reviewed and improved to ensure it complies fully with all web standards in terms of the structure, layout and content and that it follows web standards laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium and the National Disability Authority. The WRC is currently engaging with the National Disability Authority on any further improvements of the accessibility of the website and we are pleased that in our most recent review, our score is at 80%. The WRC website is translatable into 108 different languages, and publications specific to migrant workers have been translated into up to ten key languages.

The WRC efforts to accommodate all nature of disability are robust and continue to evolve and improve. However, we are dependent on notice of acute or specific needs that require significant adjustment outside of those already outlined. Our complaint form is formulated to ensure there is sufficient space to do this from the outset of the engagement with the WRC. The WRC has also published a number of guidance animations on the website to advise users of the WRC services and we have outlined these in detail in the supplied statement.

As part of its research function, the commission published a comprehensive review of its jurisprudence across equality and employment law looking at 2020 cases and analysing average awards directions, such as equality training and representation. This complements the case summaries published in the annual reports, which include emerging equality matters.

I hope I have provided the committee with a sense of the many ways in which the WRC is assisting and supporting people with disabilities to access its services. Our service users are at the centre of all services provided and we take our commitment to serve all persons equally very seriously. I thank the Cathaoirleach and the members of the committee for their kind attention and am happy to assist the committee in its deliberations in any way I can.