Republic Of Labour Law ' Irish HR Updates

• Published date: 04 November 2020
• Subject Matter: Employment and HR, Unfair/ Wrongful Dismissal, Employee Benefits & Compensation
• Law Firm: Littler Mendelson
• Author: Mr Dónall Breen

Welcome to our Halloween edition of Republic of Labour Law, a spooky newsletter in which we distil the most frightening Irish legal and HR updates from the last month in 500 words or less.

For those of you who do business in Ireland, this should be your one stop shop trick or treat for what you need to know.

This week in the Republic of Labour Law:

• Lockdown 2.0
• The Budget
• Key Case Law

Lockdown 2.0

It was somewhat inevitable; Ireland has effectively gone into a second lockdown.

The government has moved the entire country to 'Level 5' - the highest level of restriction. Although schools are still open, most businesses will need to close. Advice is to stay at home and exercise within 5km of your house.

For employers, the advice is that staff should work from home unless they are providing an essential service for which their physical presence is required. There is a surprisingly long list of what is deemed essential (see here, even lawyers make the list) but the key question will be whether physical presence is required.

Further information on what a Level 5 lockdown means can be found here.

The Budget

Death and taxes always remain a certainty, and the pandemic has shown that taxes are keeping up their fair share of that adage.

The Budget, delivered on 13 October, saw no major surprises. The key takeaways are that:

• Minimum wage will increase to '10.10 from January;
• The state pension age will not increase to 67 in 2021 as planned;
• As already announced, the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme will run until 31 March 2021. However, it was announced last week that the lowest contribution amount will increase to '350 per week to bring it in line with the Pandemic Unemployment Payment;
• Entitlement to Parents' Benefit will increase from two weeks to five weeks from April 2021.

Finally, the government also announced that employees will be eligible for Illness Benefits from the third day of sickness absence (rather than the sixth). By way of reminder, Ireland is an outlier in Europe as there is no employer sick pay requirement - only the state paid Illness Benefit. The Labour Party (who are not in government) have proposed changes to this and it seems the government are going to review their...