Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I join with everyone's comments on the positive nature of the Bill before us. It is extremely welcome. While I want to focus on the positivity of one part of the Bill, and I am very glad it has been given the priority it needs, it is very difficult to weigh it up and give it the credit it deserves because I must also acknowledge the absence of reference to the NDAs which also affect maternity leave.NDAs have been used in the past to cover up getting rid of women while they have been on maternity leave, which is obviously against the law. NDAs intersect with maternity leave in many ways. Due to the fact that the NDAs will not be before the House today, I would like the Minister to update us on where that drafting is, because we obviously expect to see it on the schedule for next week in the Dáil. That is only a few days away. I imagine the Minister has looked at a draft by now or will at least do so over the next day or two, because I cannot imagine that the draft will be produced on the day the Bill is going into the Dáil. I expect there have been updates and some sight of what that draft looks like. Rather than rehash the proceedings of the children's committee, I remind people of why NDAs are so important because this may be the only opportunity that I have to speak on them. I hope that next week I will be celebrating what comes out of the Dáil. That is the expectation I will go into it with.

Regardless of the intentions of the Minister and his officials, which have always been positive with regard to the NDA legislation, while I am not sure if it is paranoia, I have some suspicion about other actors in the background that potentially do not want to see NDA legislation pass, whether that is drafters or anybody else who would be lobbied in that regard. I say that because many powerful people have used NDAs as a tool and an abuse of their power, including at institutional level in different sectors, which include universities. A collection of academics from a university contacted me many years ago about their concern and fear about an NDA being used repeatedly for a colleague of theirs, which saw an individual move around different schools and on to a different university in the end. An NDA was used in several instances for this individual for several different workplace situations.

It was with that in mind that I began to look closer at NDAs and became aware of some people quite close to me who had signed NDAs in the community sector. That brought another layer because it means the State is investing money in service delivery in a community project and that State money has been used. They would say it is severance. It is not severance. It is a pay-off. Severance and pay-offs are very different. They have very cleverly tried to make it look like somebody is receiving a severance when, in fact, the severance is contingent and conditional on them not sharing information about the incidents for which they are signing an NDA, for many reasons. I had to meet one woman in a different county as she was on the other side of Ireland. There are women who were afraid to email me copies of their NDAs because they were so afraid that they would somehow end up in the public arena and that their house would be threatened or they would have to pay back the severance. In some cases, people have been paid as little as €5,000 under the guise of severance. They were afraid because of their position. Some had retired and had a pension. They were afraid of being challenged and having to raise what happened to them.

It is hard to champion a cause where you cannot fill a room with the people who are affected because then people do not have to face the reality of other people's lives and the silence that exists. In every briefing and event I have had on NDAs, I cannot have people in the room or if they are in the room, they are there in a silent capacity. They are not able to share their stories. They are not able to come and fill the Public Gallery today. I can tell the Minister now that there are hundreds of NDAs in circulation. Some are absolutely appalling given what is explicitly written into them. It was written into one NDA that as soon as the person signed it, that NDA meant that they were not protected by the Protected Disclosures Act. To think that somebody who has trained and studied law is going to write a contract that basically says that a piece of law no longer applies to someone if that person signs an NDA. Laypeople have no idea that this is not accurate and that they will still be protected by protected disclosures. There are people who are going to the ends of the earth to make sure people are so frightened that they can never speak up about what has happened to them in a workplace with regard to sexual harassment, racism, discrimination, bullying, or whatever the case may be.

I know the Department did its own research and was able to establish that there was a prevalence of NDAs. Funnily enough, in the interactions that I have had, in the capacity in which I could examine NDAs, men who signed NDAs most regularly had already used the Protected Disclosures Act to maybe highlight that there was a misuse of funds in a particular organisation or that they were concerned about a particular practice. In those cases, most of those men who came to me went on to sign NDAs because obviously the Protected Disclosures Act does not always protect a person's identity. As such, people become aware that someone might be the person in the organisation who has raised matters to a particular level. The orchestrated bullying campaign towards those men has come to the point where they feel they cannot be in a particular office or whatever their place of work is, and they have been bullied out of their employment. In being bullied out of their employment, they have signed NDAs to receive a severance because they are frightened of having no job and some are not ready.

In the case of one young woman in her 30s who I supported, it took two years. She was bullied badly in the organisation in which she had to sign an NDA. A union representative encouraged her to sign the NDA just to be done with it. People are never just done with it. If someone has been bullied and harassed to the point where they feel they cannot even go into their place of employment and do their job, they will not just be done with it if they sign an NDA to be silenced and to receive a severance so that they are given some breathing space before going back into the workplace. One woman could not work for two years. It took her many years to go back into the sector in which she was trained. She was so traumatised that she could not even go back into the same type of work. She was so frightened that being in the same type of work meant that even if she did not work in the same area that it happened in, the sector in Dublin is so small that if she was to arrive at a conference or some sort of event, the person who bullied her could be there. The person who bullied her want on to have other cases in which NDAs had to be signed too.

The fact that union representatives or solicitors would encourage people to sign NDAs asserting that they will somehow then be done with it is a complete abuse of power and fearmongering. Solicitors and union representatives should be more confident about doing a better job to protect people, not pushing them further into harm and silence. That silence is often about things that could be illegal if they were brought in front of a court of law. People are therefore being encouraged to sign a contract to cover up something that potentially meets the legal standard for prosecuting a person.

In and of itself, the idea of a non-disclosure agreement for such cases should not stand up in a court of law. People are afraid to challenge them because there is no precedent for somebody breaking an NDA and taking the issue to court to see if the NDA would stand. Often, these people are of less means than the institutions and employers for which they have signed the NDA.

In my last few seconds, I will draw attention to why the issue of NDAs is so important. Some employers have started to put NDA clauses in their contracts when people are taking jobs. Nothing has happened yet but there are clauses that resemble NDA clauses. There is also the idea of a non-disparaging clause, which means people cannot speak about anything that happens while employed or even criticise the employer. It even comes down to criticism. To think that people cannot criticise a past employer if it had bad practices is beyond me.

We cannot put a face to all of these people but they are there. This is very real. These people are watching, and they are contacting me all the time. I am sure they are also contacting the Minister's office to make sure this legislation passes. Even though we know it may not retrospectively apply, it will set a standard that non-disclosure agreements do not stand up, that they are illegal, wrong and immoral, and that they are of a time past when the State and other people used certain tools to make sure people were silenced. I hope next week we will show we do not support the use of power to keep people silent in this way and we legislate to end the use of NDAs.