Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 2:

In page 6, between lines 33 and 34, to insert the following: “(b) The Commission shall not include in a published decision the name of a party to proceedings where it is felt that to do so would detrimentally impact on either party specifically with reference to the capacity of a party to secure employment in the future.”.

This amendment comes from the same place as the previous one. I have proposed it to ensure a workers' name is not included in a published decision where it will interfere with a potential employment in the future. The section of the Bill I have sought to amend is one which I believe needs to be strengthened. It could possibly be strengthened by the regulations, and I am very open to discussing that, but I would appreciate it if the Minister of State would put on the record of the Dáil this evening his intention to engage with us and to address this specific issue. It would be worthwhile to have engagement with the representatives of workers, including ICTU. I am thinking in particular of the workers' rights section in SIPTU, which takes on a lot of individual cases. A lot can be learned in that regard. It has a huge bank of knowledge on what motivates and demotivates workers from taking cases.

I appreciate what the Supreme Court has said about matters being in public but I am concerned that, as an unintended consequence of that, there will be something of a chilling effect. These are questions I have been asked. I was in the WRC a couple of weeks ago, although it has been a while since I have represented workers regularly, and among the first questions you are asked are, "Who will know about this?", "Will my name be published?" and "Will this be public knowledge?" It is welcome that this will not appear in the results of a Google search, and I would be very interested to hear how that will be prevented if the decisions are in public and how it would not show up in the results of a Google search. The discretion needs to be given to the WRC not to publish the name of an individual where that person is the person taking the case. This amendment will allow for discretion to be shown and for a worker's name to be redacted from the published decision.

I hope the Minister of State will accept this amendment and accept the spirit in which it is intended. It is not my intention to delay this. As the Minister of State will be aware, we waived pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, we engaged with his Department and we do not have very much time to discuss it this evening. It is important legislation.

The Minister of State will be aware I took on a case recently. I was there only in my capacity as a friend of the worker taking the case. She was very concerned because it had to be explained at the beginning that we were in the interregnum between the Supreme Court decision and the publication of the legislation. The adjudication officer was very patient and explained to us exactly what the ramifications were and exactly what had to happen in respect of publication of the name. The person I was accompanying did have to take some time to think about this and was worried about it. This is a guess on my part, but I would say that, had she known at the start of the process she could potentially have ended up having her name made public, she might have thought twice about it. Every person who takes a case to the WRC will probably tell you this but, to me, the case I was accompanying this woman on was a very straightforward case. It is pretty black-and-white and is a matter of a legal entitlement denied. She therefore has not done anything wrong and there was no suggestion she had done anything wrong. There is no suggestion of any impropriety at all on the part of either party. It was a matter of paperwork. My concern, however, from the conversation I had with her, is that she may not have pursued what is her legal entitlement had she known her name could have been made public.

We had to have a sidebar conference during the start of the hearing to tease out the potential implications. Had I been in a position to say to that woman we could petition for her name to be redacted, I know that would have given her a lot of comfort, and this was a case in which there was no real acrimony between the worker and the boss. It was one of those things. It was a procedural thing. The point is this was not a massive adversarial case in which people were preparing to take entrenched positions.

Of course that can sometimes be the case, but you would not want a situation where any worker would have pause, or indeed any employer. An employer might not want their name associated for whatever reason with cases being taken to third parties.

The amendment allows for discretion and for the adjudicator in the WRC to have the discretion to redact a person's name so that the person would have an opportunity to make his or her case as to why that person thinks his or her name should be redacted. That gives discretion to the adjudicator to be able to offer that to a worker when he or she may be considering withdrawing the case, even where the worker has a decent case to make. We were happy to work with the Government constructively. The amendments I have suggested are intended only to ensure this works. I understand and respect this came from the Supreme Court and that it has to be dealt with but the amendment provides that where discretion can be given, it should be. If it is not possible to accept this amendment, which I think is very reasonable - I am sure that the Ceann Comhairle has probably never heard anyone say they were proposing an amendment they thought was unreasonable, but this one is particularly reasonable because it strengthens the legislation - I want the Minister of State to explain the position and whether it is possible for the discretion to be provided for under the legislation as it now stands.

See this speech in context