Scheduling of Appeals
The Labour Court receives many hundreds of appeals each year across the various industrial relations and employment rights statutes.
Appeals must not only be allocated sufficient court time to deal with the matter, but very importantly there is also a requirement that the hearing take place within a reasonable period from the time that the appeal is received by the Court.
All parties appearing before courts and statutory tribunals, such as the Labour Court, are entitled to have their appeal heard within a reasonable timeframe. This places important responsibilities on courts and tribunals to organise the operation of their functions so as to adhere to their obligations to parties in that regard.
This obligation to parties is central to the processes and procedures adopted by the Labour Court and elucidated in its published Rules. The Court’s rules in relation to the scheduling of appeals are given specific statutory basis under Section 20(5A) of the Industrial Relations Act, 1946.
The Labour Court operates a fixed listing system for the scheduling of its appeals. This means that parties receive a specific scheduled date and time for the hearing of their case. This is in contrast to a ‘callover’ system that tends to operate in ordinary civil courts, where numerous cases are listed for hearing at the same time and all parties are obliged to attend in readiness for their hearing. The result is that a variety of factors will determine whether or not a case gets heard on the day that the parties attend for hearing.
The approach of the Labour Court is to create, in so far as is possible, a degree of certainty for the parties as regards the scheduling and hearing of their case from start to finish. This approach is reliant upon the processes and procedures operated by the Court and the adherence by parties to those procedures, as contained in the rules of the Court.
The allocation of court time is a crucial aspect to effective court operations and is heavily dependent upon the co-operation of parties with the rules. The Court deals with appeals spanning the full spectrum of employment law and industrial relations statutes in Ireland. This includes approximately forty-five pieces of primary legislation, from which emanates hundreds of appeals to the Court annually.
Court time must, therefore, be regarded as limited and valuable. The Court, as a result, allocates significant time and resources to its scheduling operation, including file preparation, hearing time allocation per appeal and programming of hearings.
There are four pieces of legislation in particular where the hearing of appeals requires allocation of significant court time. These are: Unfair Dismissals Acts, 1977 to 2015; Employment Equality Acts, 1998 to 2021; Protected Disclosures Act, 2014; Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Acts, 2005 to 2014.
When appeals are received under any of these four statutes, the appellant is required to provide to the Court and the opposing party, within a period of three weeks, a written submission setting out the facts and legal arguments being relied upon. The submission must also include details of any witnesses intending to be called, together with a summary of the evidence to be provided by those witnesses. Upon receipt of the submission, the opposing party then has three weeks to lodge a replying submission in like manner.
Within six weeks of receipt of an appeal in these types of cases, the Court is in a position to assess the appeal to determine the appropriate court time to be allocated. Once that assessment is complete, the appeal can be scheduled, and the parties notified.
Appeals under other employment statutes, and industrial relations appeals, are assessed for court time allocation upon receipt of appeal documentation and in advance of receipt of written submissions. In those cases, submissions are required no later than ten days prior to the hearing.
Given the obligations on the Court to complete matters within a reasonable timeframe, balanced with the demands on court time, the Court will strive to ensure not only that a hearing takes place as scheduled, but also that the hearing proceeds to conclusion without undue delay and interruption.
The Court will, accordingly, be stringent regarding adherence to the rules that affect scheduling and will likely be very sensitive to anything which may impinge upon the management of proceedings fairly and expeditiously. Loss of court time will be minimised and avoided wherever possible.
This means that rigour will be applied to the Court’s consideration of any scheduling-related matters. As a result, scheduled hearings, for example, will only be postponed in exceptional circumstances. Likewise, extensions to timeframes for providing submissions will not be easily granted.
Parties sometimes seek to provide submissions and documentation after the deadline has passed or seek to augment earlier submissions. Such requests, outside the rules of the Court, have the potential to affect the court time assigned to the case, and therefore will not be automatically agreed to by the Court.
It will be a matter for the Court division assigned to the case to consider the request and decide on the day of the hearing, having due regard to the conduct of a fair process, whether to admit the late submissions/documentation.
