On a PIP in Ireland: procedure decides, and the WRC clock

Why Ireland is different from the advice you have been reading

Dublin hosts the EMEA headquarters of much of US big tech, so a great many Irish PIPs are American instruments running under Irish law. That hybrid is the thing to understand: a plan designed for at-will America has to additionally satisfy Irish procedural law here, and often does not do so cleanly.

The gate, and where the argument actually happens

Unfair-dismissal protection generally requires 12 months' continuous service, with exceptions that bypass the gate entirely — pregnancy and related rights, trade-union membership, protected disclosures. That is the first question in any Irish case.

Past the gate, competence is a potentially fair ground for dismissal, and the dismissal is presumed unfair until the employer proves both the substance and a fair process. In practice the WRC largely defers on substance: if a reasonable employer could honestly conclude you were not meeting the standard, that limb is met.

So the argument is about process, almost entirely. That is unusual and it is good news if your employer's process was thin.

What does an employer have to prove?

Before dismissing for competence, an employer must:

• tell you how you are failing to do the job adequately
• warn you that dismissal is a possibility on that ground
• give you a real opportunity to improve

Isolated passing comments about performance do not count as warnings. They have to be clear and unambiguous.

Irish practitioner guidance puts the consequence bluntly: a performance dismissal without a proper improvement plan, adequate warnings, support and fair procedures will almost certainly be found unfair, however genuine the underlying concerns were. Ireland is the jurisdiction where the plan is the expected legal instrument — a missing or sham one is the employer's problem rather than yours.

Fair procedures attach to the dismissal, not to the plan itself

A 2024 adjudication rejected the argument that the full set of fair procedures attaches to the PIP process itself. The procedural requirements bite when the employer moves toward dismissal.

In practice: arguing "my PIP meeting had no representation" tends to lose. Arguing that the outcome was predetermined, that support was absent, or that there was no real opportunity to improve is where cases turn.

The Code of Practice on Grievance and Disciplinary Procedures (S.I. 146/2000) is the spine the WRC measures against — allegations in writing, a right to respond, a right to representation by a colleague or union rep, impartiality, a warning ladder with improvement as its stated purpose, and an appeal.

Your job-search log is the compensation

This is the most concrete thing on this page.

Redress is reinstatement, re-engagement, or — overwhelmingly in practice — compensation for financial loss, capped at 104 weeks' pay. If there is no financial loss, the maximum is four weeks' pay. It is not a tariff. It is built from evidence.

And the duty to mitigate is examined closely. The test is not whether you found work but whether you sought comparable work. Documented applications, recruiter engagement and reasonable refusals sustain awards. Thin evidence gets them cut, sometimes heavily — in one case a claimant who took short-term work outside her proven field lost most of her claimed loss on that basis.

Every logged application, recruiter call and rejection is evidence. In Ireland the job search you are running alongside the plan has a documented value, whichever way the plan itself goes. How to run that search while the plan is still open, and what to tell an interviewer about it, is its own page.

Dates and money

• Six months to lodge a WRC complaint, extendable to twelve for reasonable cause. The deadlines page has that clock beside the others the guide covers.
• Statutory minimum notice runs one to eight weeks by tenure; contracts often exceed it.
• There is no statutory severance for a performance dismissal. Negotiated exits run on ex gratia settlement payments, which carry meaningful tax relief — so the same gross figure is worth more when it is structured correctly. That is genuine Irish deal currency and worth advice.
• Probation sits largely outside the Acts in the first year, and fair procedures do not attach to a pure performance dismissal during probation. Statutory probation is generally capped at six months, and what probation changes in four countries has the Irish detail.
• Jobseeker's Benefit can carry a disqualification period for leaving voluntarily without just cause. Performance failure is not misconduct on ordinary principles.
• On an employment permit, the four weeks and six months you will find are a redundancy scheme, and a performance dismissal is not a redundancy. What an employment permit does when a plan ends badly has the scope trap and the change-of-employer route that runs while you are still in the job.

Reported figures describe those cases, not yours

Fairhanded is not a law firm. Irish redress is evidence-built and fact-specific, and figures from reported decisions describe those cases rather than yours. Where your situation turns on a legal question, take it to an Irish employment solicitor — and start the log today either way.