
By Dónall Breen - 30 April 2020
Welcome to our April edition of Republic of Labour Law, a monthly newsletter in which we distil the most important Irish legal and HR updates from the last month in 500 words or less.
If you do business in Ireland, this should be your one stop shop for what you need to know.
This week in the Republic of Labour Law:
Unsurprisingly, Covid-19 continues to dominate the news. For those of you availing of the Covid-Wage Subsidy Scheme there are a few points you should be aware of:
It is different to the UK scheme in a number of ways, so don’t confuse the two:
The scheme is currently running until 18 June 2020. However, the government is publishing its plan for reopening the economy on 5 May 2020 so look out for any further updates then.
Finally, the government has tweaked the system lately so that lower earners are not worse off by continuing to go to work (even though some anomalies remain). Therefore, if you have costed the system on the information a few weeks ago, it may be worth revisiting this now.
Separately, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has published an article called Data Protection Tips for Video-Conferencing. It’s actually quite useful and worth a read if you are (like everyone else) now doing a lot of your work online. Most companies will experience a breach at some stage (small or large), so it worth having your ‘ducks in a row’ - being able to show you were as compliant as the DPC suggests!
In a welcomed break from Covid-19 news, I also managed to track down some weird and wonderful cases from the Irish courts:
That’s all for this month. In the meantime, stay safe and stay in.