Whistleblowing Litigation and Legislation in Ireland: Are There Lessons to be Learned?

The Protected Disclosures Act 2014 is Ireland’s main workplace whistleblowing legislation. It will be amended by the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Act 2022 on 1 January 2023 on foot of Ireland’s obligation to transpose into national law Directive 2019/1937/EU of the European Parliament and the Council of 23 October 2019 on the protection of persons who report breaches of EU law.

This paper addresses the question of whether, in amending the 2014 Act, there were lessons that could have been learnt from the experience in the United Kingdom (UK) in the operation of its whistleblowing legislation. In answering this question, the findings of an analysis of the case law under the 2014 Act between 15 July 2014 and 15 July 2020 are presented and discussed. In conducting the case law analysis, specific issues were assessed, including, procedural issues concerning the forum for the taking of a claim, costs, fees, processing times, and time limits for presenting penalisation claims and substantive issues regarding the type of claim and the success rate.

The research established that there are deficiencies in the 2014 Act, and in some of its amendments under the 2022 Act. It also established that there is an inequity in the treatment under the legislation of ‘employees’ and workers other than employees. The author concludes that to address these procedural and substantive deficiencies and inequities, Ireland should have gone beyond the minimum standards of the Directive and looked to the UK for guidance.