Hear, hear.

Sentiment score: 0.00

I thank the Independent Technical Group for tabling this motion. It is an issue close to my heart and it is personal. I welcome, like other colleagues, those who have gathered in the Gallery this morning. They are people who have taken enormous personal risks to do what is right. Not only have they all served the people in their roles as civil and public servants, but they have doubly served the people by taking risks to expose wrongdoing in their places of work. They have been at the forefront, whether they believe or accept it given what they have gone through, of initiating significant change. I have some history in and personal attachment to the principle of what is termed whistleblowing. I am proud of the small role I played, more than ten years ago, in helping to develop what was then pioneering legislation, namely, the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, with my colleague, former Deputy Brendan Howlin. I come from a political tradition of reformers, from a movement that believes in solidarity and in supporting people where injustices are being done, where people are encouraged and supported to tell the truth and where individual citizens, once empowered and protected, can do great and important things. It is in this tradition that the 2014 Act and the subsequent 2015 code of practice for the Workplace Relations Commission that I signed into law came into being. The intention and ambition of that legislation was wide-ranging, and its principles were, and still are, laudable. The law then and now is first and foremost legislation that should, at all times, be and intend to be all about the protection of whistleblowers who report wrongdoing in their organisation from dismissal and any form of penalisation. In its implementation by officials in far too many cases, it has too often fallen short of those ambitions and too many people have been dragged through the mire and have been destroyed. The legislation, the supporting material and the code of practice that I referred to go into great detail, setting out what all of this involves, including what penalisation looks, sounds and feels like. This is in case anyone is capable of misunderstanding it, deliberately or otherwise. I had cause to look again at the material on the WRC website associated with the code of practice, and frankly it could not be clearer. Here are just some of the terms used, in case people have not seen it or are not aware of it, when it talks about penalisation. It refers to suspension, dismissal, demotion, disciplining, unfair treatment, discrimination, harassment and threat of reprisal. I could go on. We are aware of all of this. It talks about "a culture of encouraging workers to speak out if they have genuine concerns". The protected disclosures legislation that was enacted in 2014 and has since been revised and amended, and then updated as per the EU directive in 2022, has given a voice and legislative protections, at least, to workers who have, time and again, taken their courage into their hands, raised their voices and gone through all of the channels laid out in the legislation to make protective disclosures, perhaps over serious wrongdoing, initially to a designated person within their own workplace or externally or, in some specific cases, to a Government Minister or through other means laid out in the Act and the code. This has led to concrete changes in workplaces, with the uncovering of malpractice, fraud and other criminal acts. To those who have done this, we all owe a debt of sincere gratitude. To those who have done the right thing, but have been let down badly by a system that is obliged to protect and support people, and who have been abused, humiliated, diminished and forced out of their work, we owe you all a system of whistleblowing that works as it was always intended to do. It can be argued, notwithstanding the motion, and I would argue this case to a point, that we are not actually in need of new legislation but in need of proper implementation and enforcement of the legislation that is already on the Statute Book. I had the opportunity to speak last night with Noel McGree, who is with us today. His experience is well known, but perhaps not as well understood by the wider public as it ought to be. He did the right thing. His claims were proven to have been correct and he has suffered, as was said earlier, inordinately. If cases like Noel's keep emerging, then we have a system that needs to be constantly reviewed and revised to ensure the legislation is always, in all cases, being adhered to, implemented and enforced. Where there are failures, there needs to be accountability. We must remember that it is people who are responsible for systems and failures in those systems. In too many cases I have seen, processes set down in law have been treated as unimportant by some people whose job it is to manage, engage with, handle and process complaints. While it may be the case that it is a minority of workers making protective disclosures who experience detrimental effects, this is hardly the point. The scale and extent of the apparent campaigns of reprisals experienced by many who have gone public and have spoken about the toll and upheaval they and their families have experienced, once they blew the whistle and were entitled to the full protection of the Act but were failed, must not go unnoticed by anyone. Going back to Noel McGree, he and I agree, having discussed this last night and we had email exchanges, that the legislation we have does, in theory, provide strong protections for whistleblowers. It is in the implementation where the problems arise. We can have all the fine legislation and regulation in the world, but if bodies are not resourced and if the law is not enforced, then this brings the system into disrepute. Well-intentioned law is not what we want. We want enforcement and citizens having the confidence that when they follow their conscience and do what is right and report wrongdoing, there is a well-resourced system that sees disclosures that are made in good faith, through the correct channels and in compliance with the letter and spirit of the Act, processed properly. There should be a system where regular communication is made with the complainant, where disclosures are adjudicated fairly and where things actually demonstrably change as a result of that risk being taken. This is a system that rests and depends on the trust and confidence of the public. This is why there is an onus on those who are in positions of responsibility to be unequivocal and unambiguously clear on what they say in the Dáil and to not mislead, however unintentional that may be. This takes me to comments made on the record of the House on 12 November 2025 by the Taoiseach in respect of the handling of protected disclosures. In essence, he appears to have claimed that there is somehow a form of prohibition of some description on a Minister reading a protected disclosure that was duly submitted to the Minister. The claim seems to have been made that he has legal advice to that effect. This is arrant nonsense and it would be useful and in the public interest if the Taoiseach clarified his comments. The functions of Ministers receiving a relevant protected disclosure and what happens to that disclosure next are clearly laid out and, I would hope, well understood by Ministers. Again, this has been raised with me by Noel McGree, who has also raised connected concerns over the application of the Carltona principle and the real-world potential for cases to be handled and processed without complete ministerial knowledge, and in situations - this is important - where independence may be called into question. This is a matter that requires vigilance. A Deputy mentioned earlier the cases of protective disclosures made by members of the Defence Forces Justice Alliance. Those very same issues that were raised involve concerns being expressed over the independence of those who may be handling complaints and potential conflicts of interest. This is something that we need to be alive to. We are also well aware of the practice of whistleblowers being forced out of their work on grounds of ill health. This seems to me to be an all too familiar occurrence. There is also the way this can be used as a means to effectively blacklist someone and ensure the person does not work again. All of this just serves to illustrate how far things can go and the impact on those who make protected disclosures when the system decides to circle the wagons. Some significant strides were made in the 2022 Act, and that was acknowledged. Some amendments I and colleagues in Sinn Féin and other parties tabled should have been adopted by the Government at the time. Unfortunately, they were not and I feel that we will be revisiting that. The proof of the pudding, as the saying goes, will be in the eating. Again, it is all well and good having excellent legislation on paper, but the test is the enforcement of its provisions at all times and in all cases, with no exceptions. With some of the new provisions, especially the provision in relation to specifying defined acts of penalisation of criminal acts, there appears to be very little familiarity about these provisions in the agencies responsible for prosecuting them and how they are actually properly applied. There may very well be resource issues in this regard, but it is important, when legislation is enacted in this House, that the authorities responsible for prosecuting and processing complaints in that regard know what they are doing, engage properly with complainants and that justice is done.

Sentiment score: 0.13