Introduction

This article considers the important Labour Court case of National University of Ireland Maynooth and Buckley (FTC/10/22, Determination No FTD1015, 15th November, 2010). Although this email focuses on fixed-term work and just one case, which as you will see was unusual, it covers many angles of the legislation and jurisprudence in question. Simple, it is not.

We start with a review of the legislation.

First introduced in July 2003 to transpose the EU directive on the rights of fixed term workers agreed by the European social partners, the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003 has caused considerable difficulties for many employers, particularly for publicly funded organisations such as the Health Services Executive (HSE) who have routinely used