A former public servant who alleges he was penalised for criticising the level of ability with Irish in the Food Safety Authority is to have his employment rights claims heard in Irish later this year.
Seanán Ó Coistín, a former communications executive at the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, has complained his rights under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, the Protection of Employment (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003, and the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 were breached while working there.
Addressing his whistleblower penalisation complaint, Mr Ó Coistín told the Workplace Relations Commission he made a protected disclosure about the level of "ability" at the FSAI in relation to the State's "first official language" prior to the end of his employment there in late 2024.
Counsel for the respondent, Paul Gough of Beauchamps Solicitors, said Mr Ó Coistín had been engaged by the FSAI via a recruitment agency on "a series of fixed-term contracts", the last of which had expired at the end of the year.
Mr Ó Coistín had filed one complaint form under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, but it was not clear that later complaints filed in July 2025 were in time, Mr Gough submitted.
The complainant later said he was disadvantaged in pursuing the Protected Disclosures and Protection of Employees complaints because Irish-language versions of those pieces of legislation were not published online with their English-language versions.
'Bia as Gaeilge'
The complainant had brought two large suitcases full of food and drink labelled in Irish with him to his hearing at Lansdowne House in Dublin yesterday.
Bottles of beer, blocks of cheese, snack food, coffee, chocolates and the makings of a cooked breakfast were all laid on the conference room table, along with fast food and supermarket advertising material as Gaeilge, when adjudication Brian Dalton arrived.
"What is this?" Mr Dalton asked.
"Bia as Gaeilge," Mr Ó Coistin said. He then asked Mr Dalton: "An bhfuil Gaeilge agatsa?" to which the adjudicator replied: "No. I’ll talk about that in a minute."
Mr Dalton swore in an official interpreter and said the WRC had assigned a bilingual adjudication officer to hear the case, but that the official had become unavailable last Thursday.
He offered Mr Ó Coistín the option of proceeding with an interpreter, or adjourning the matter until an adjudicator with Irish could hear the case.
After this was interpreted for Mr Ó Coistín, the complainant said he wanted to "do it now, because I’ve waited to do it for a long time".
'Better with someone who has Irish'
After a further recess at lunchtime, Mr Dalton reconvened and said the matter of Mr Ó Coistín’s unfair dismissals case was "complicated" by his Protected Disclosures Action.
He said he was going to list the matter for a two-day hearing, on notice to the FSAI and employment agency Orange Recruitment as joint respondents.
"I started off by saying there was someone assigned who's better at Irish than I am. I can continue with the case unless you're saying "I’d rather have an adjudicator with Irish," Mr Dalton said.
"I think it would be better with someone who has Irish," the interpreter said on behalf of Mr Ó Coistín.
Mr Dalton said the proceedings before him had been limited to case management and that had not taken jurisdiction over the hearing, and that he had "asked for someone with a higher level of Irish" to hear the substance of the complaints.
The resumed date for the case has not yet been given by the WRC.
