One of the State's biggest hospitals, St James's in Dublin, has lodged an appeal against a ruling that it discriminated against a Malaysian doctor on racial grounds.
The Labour Court will hear the appeal on May 29th, following a ruling last December by the Office of the Director of Equality Investigations that the hospital discriminated against a former intern, Dr Bennet Eng (26).
The director's office held that it was unlawful for Dr Eng to work as an intern without a basic salary when Irish intern colleagues working alongside him were in salaried positions.
Dr Eng, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, worked for nine months in 2000 and 2001 as an unpaid intern in St James's.
A specific number of funded intern posts are available to medical graduates every year in St James's, as well as the State's other main hospitals.
If the number of graduates in a given year exceeds the number of funded posts on offer, the remaining doctors are allocated unpaid intern positions.
However, priority for funded posts is given to Irish doctors or those from the European Economic Area, the 12 EU states and Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, with non-EEA graduates displaced from paid posts to make way for EEA graduates.
In Dr Eng's case, an EU graduate who was ranked lower than him on merit was allocated a paid internship post.
The hospital had contended that this system was justified, as it was obliged under employment law to offer paid intern jobs to EEA nationals who do not require work permits, before offering them to non-EEA nationals who do.
It also maintained that this system was necessary to meet the requirements of the Treaty of Rome, which provides for equal treatment for workers within the EEA.
The equality officer ruled that the treaty did not oblige employers to discriminate against non-EU nationals and that national law governed the rights and entitlements of third-country nationals resident here.
A spokesman for the hospital said yesterday it was seeking a Labour Court determination due to "the apparent conflict between provisions in the Employment Equality Act and the work permit system".
The hospital contends that its recruitment practices are "wholly compliant" with existing employment laws, he said, stressing its track record as an equal opportunities employer with a multi-ethnic workforce.
In his submission to the Labour Court, Dr Eng contends that the existing work permit rules are unlawful and undermine the the Employment Equality Act, as they oblige employers to discriminate against non-nationals.