Ivana Bacik (Independent)

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 5, line 21, after "opinion" to insert "or suspicion".

The purpose of this amendment is clear. It is simply to provide protection for whistleblowers who report their suspicion as well as their opinion. In the proposed new sections 8A(1) and 8A(5)(a) to be inserted in the 2001 Act the Minister provides that there will only be protection for a whistleblower who gives an opinion. We suggest a broader protection to provide protection in reporting a suspicion. I believe the Minister claimed in the Dáil that it was not necessary to include the word "suspicion", but it might be preferable for the sake of certainty to add the extra term.

In respect of protection for whistleblowers in section 4, the Labour Party very much welcomes this provision, but it envisaged broader protection for them to replace the Government's preferred sectoral approach, whereby whistleblower protection would be provided in many items of legislation, with generic legislation to protect all whistleblowers in the public, private and non-profit sectors. As the Minister is aware, we brought forward a whistleblowers protection Bill in January this year which would have provided such general protection. As the Minister will also be aware, Transparency International recommended this year that such generic legislation would be preferable. The Standards in Public Office Commission also stated this year that the introduction of comprehensive public interest disclosure and whistleblower protection laws would send a clear signal that wrongdoing was not to be tolerated. Instead whistleblower protection provisions are inserted in myriad items of legislation by the Government. The sectoral approach is very different.

The Department's paper on white collar crime was published in October. I attended the seminar in the Criminal Courts of Justice when the Minister spoke on it. The point is made in the paper that whistleblower protection provisions are contained in a number of Acts such as the Competition Act 2002, the Garda Síochána Act 2005, the Consumer Protection Act 2007, the Chemicals Act 2008, the Charities Act 2009, the National Asset Management Agency Act 2009, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work 2005 and so on. It seems a more preferable approach - the one recommended by experts such as Transparency International - would be to enact a generic or general protection provision for whistleblowers in one item of legislation, as the Labour Party proposed. That would mean one Department taking responsibility for the protection of whistleblowers. Instead various Departments are taking responsibility for their protection, which raises issues about consistency. This is a much bigger issue than this Bill, but section 4 raises the question again as to why the Government has not opted to provide more general protection that would offer greater consistency and certainty for whistleblowers. Having said that, we welcome the section, but a better approach would be to go for a generic provision, not a sectoral method, to provide protection.