WRC adjourns Trinity equality claim after directing further legal submissions

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

The Workplace Relations Commission adjourned historian Abhijit Sarkar’s workplace equality claim against Trinity College Dublin, giving the university until later in February to file submissions responding to papers Sarkar had submitted on Monday. The commission is preparing to hear his complaint under the Employment Equality Act 1998.

At a preliminary hearing, Trinity’s counsel asked the adjudicator to direct Sarkar not to share legal papers beyond the parties. Adjudicator Brian Dalton said he could not stop Sarkar from doing anything, but said a plain reading of the law suggested information submitted to him as part of his investigation should not be widely shared. The university had said it would present statistics in defence of the claim; the merits of the complaint were not decided at the hearing.