Claims brought to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) under whistleblower protection law tripled last year, with the employment tribunal noting a "considerable increase" in its latest annual report.
The tribunal received 301 complaints under the Protected Disclosures Act last year – up 201% on the 96 claims lodged in 2022 – marking the first time ever that statutory complaints of whistleblower penalisation have exceeded 100.
Amendments to the original legislation came into force in January 2023 requiring all private sector organisations with 250 or more staff to set up formal reporting channels for protected disclosures.
The changes also extended whistleblower protections to cover volunteers, trainees, shareholders and company boards, as well as job applicants, among others.
The amended legislation also shifted the burden of proof to require a respondent to disprove a connection between an act of penalisation and a protected disclosure.
Commenting on the figures, barrister and protected disclosures expert David Byrnes BL said: "It would seem that the largest obstacle whistleblowers alleging penalisation had faced in their claims before the WRC was being able to prove a connection between a protected disclosure and penalisation."
"That burden of proof now rests firmly with the employer… it having been recognised EU-wide that whistleblower penalisation is typically perpetrated in a clandestine-type manner," Mr Byrnes added.
Mr Byrnes said the changes in the law left an open question about whether it was appropriate for the person bringing a complaint, or the respondent party to the claim, to give evidence first before the tribunal.
However, Mr Byrnes said the matter of compensation for whistleblower penalisation was becoming clearly aligned to practices in anti-discrimination law.
"The European Court of Justice has given a clear signal that awards should have a compensatory effect as well as a dissuasive effect," Mr Byrnes said.
He also pointed to the WRC's decision to make an award at the maximum of its jurisdiction in a whistleblower case last year.
In that case, the tribunal gave five years’ wages, €91,000, to a masseuse who was pressured into providing her male boss with sexual services and later dismissed after resisting pressure to "expand" her "range of services" to clients at a Dublin massage parlour.
Commenting generally on the annual report, Audrey Cahill, the WRC’s director-general, said 2023 had been the "first full year of normal services" for the WRC since 2019, and thanked her staff for "high standards of delivery and commitment" across all areas of its operations.
"Significant trends have begun to emerge in some key areas of our activity which will inform our workplans in the coming years and we look forward to continued positive engagements with all of our service users and stakeholders," Ms Cahill said in a press statement.
The tribunal’s inspectors went to some 4,727 businesses and discovered 2,221 in breach of their obligations under employment law, the report notes. €1,950,601 million in unpaid wages was recovered for employees, an increase of more than half a million euro on 2022.
Over a quarter of recovered wages, €565,409, were from food service businesses, which saw the highest number of inspections of any economic sector and a 58% rate of non-compliance with employment law among those inspected.
