Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate on the Protected Disclosures Bill, which is an important and welcome piece of legislation.

The Bill sets out to provide a general protection from reprisal to workers who report suspected wrongdoing within their organisations. It applies to both the public and private sectors and its protections are designed to encourage potential whistleblowers to come forward and to prompt higher standards in business, employment and society. The ultimate intention of the legislation is to effect a cultural change right across society, to ensure things are done properly in the future. The Bill applies to those who make a disclosure about wrongdoing in the workplace and provides protections for them if they are penalised by their employer as a result.

In its guidelines on international principles for whistleblower legislation, Transparency International speaks about the right of citizens to report wrongdoing as a natural extension of the right to freedom of expression and as linked to the principles of transparency and integrity. All people have the inherent right to protect the well-being of other citizens and society at large, and in some cases have the duty to report wrongdoing. Transparency International states that the absence of effective protection can, therefore, pose a dilemma for whistleblowers. They are often expected to report corruption and other crimes, but doing so can expose them to retaliation.

Too often we have seen - as we did recently in this State - how whistleblowers are treated. We have a history and culture of viewing whistleblowers as informers or as people who should be looked down on. This legislation needs to change this, but we as a society also need to change to ensure people who expose wrongdoing in the public interest are respected and treated properly and not ostracised or penalised for putting forward remedies in the public interest or exposing bad or illegal practices and criminal wrongdoing in business. It is important this cultural change happens as it will bring more integrity. Perhaps we will even get to a stage in the future where this legislation will not be required. That may be a utopian view, but we should aspire to a situation where there will be no need for this legislation because of a significant culture change where businesses and public bodies do business in the right way.

As has been outlined in the House previously, the current legislation in this area is partial and inconsistent and provides various levels of protection for the employment and industry sectors. Approximately 25 pieces of legislation cover various forms of whistleblowing and different sectoral interests. It is believed that the lack of general protection has stopped potential whistleblowers from coming forward. I believe this is true. Workers who come across wrongdoing in the workplace feel very nervous about exposing it or bringing it to the public domain because of retaliation and the risk involved to themselves. The Bill outlines that a disclosure should be made to an employer in the first instance, but there are other avenues within the legislation workers can take, depending on the circumstances of the case. These include making disclosures to Members of the Dáil. The Bill provides for six channels of disclosure and different tests will apply to decide which disclosure is a protected disclosure and which channel should be used.

Having examined the legislation and read the debates that took place in the Seanad on it, the Bill seems to be very cumbersome. There may be good reasons for this, but there were calls in the Seanad debate for a code of practice and that there was mention of the possible publication of such a code. A code of practice is vital and should be published in line with the enactment of the Bill. This code should be made available to all workers and we should have an extensive campaign to make workers aware of it.

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