A candidate emails the day before the onsite and asks whether they can have the technical questions in advance, or do the system design round as a take-home. Someone on the panel says something that sounds completely fair:
"We can't do that; we treat every candidate the same."
I went looking for what Irish law says about that sentence, because I could not find a straight answer anywhere. Every neurodiversity guide I found was written for US employers and framed around the Americans with Disabilities Act. I work in Dublin. I wanted to know what applies here.
What follows is what an engineer found in the statute, the case law summaries and the government guidelines. I am not a solicitor and this is not advice. Where I am confident, I say so. Where I am not, I say that too, because the version of this article I would have written six months ago sounded far more certain than the sources actually support.
This is the follow-up to The Autism Stats In The Tech Industry And The Real Hiring Problem, where I pulled apart the numbers people quote at conferences.
The provision that applies here is Section 16
Section 16 of the Employment Equality Acts 1998–2015 puts a duty on the employer to take "appropriate measures" so that a person with a disability can access employment, participate or advance in employment, or undergo training. The limit is a "disproportionate burden", judged against the cost, the scale and the financial resources of the business, and against the availability of public funding.
Three things in that sentence are worth pulling out. Confidence: high on all three. They are on the face of the statute and in the IHREC guidance.
It covers applicants. The duty attaches at access to employment, so an interview loop is in scope, not only the job someone already holds.
It covers advancement. Promotion, performance review and training are named. If your staff-engineer bar is defined by unwritten expectations transmitted socially, that is worth thinking about carefully.
The burden scales with the employer. A twelve-person startup and a US multinational with a Dublin engineering office are not held to the same standard.
The origin is EU law — Article 5 of Directive 2000/78/EC — so the shape of the duty is broadly familiar across the EU even where the domestic wording differs.
One caveat that applies to Dublin more than most places
The ADA is not simply irrelevant here. Section 109 of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 extended Title VII and the ADA to American citizens employed abroad by an American employer or by a foreign entity controlled by an American employer, with a defence where compliance would require the employer to break local law. A US-headquartered multinational will generally be treated as US-controlled.
So an American engineer in the Dublin office of a US multinational may be covered by both statutes. Everyone else in that building is on Section 16. Confidence: high on the statutory position, low on how often it has been tested in an Irish context.
What the case law says, stated carefully
The leading authority is the Supreme Court decision in Daly v Nano Nagle School [2019] IESC 63. Reading the law firm summaries rather than the judgment itself, the parts that seem settled:
The employer is under a mandatory duty to take all appropriate measures unless a measure would be a disproportionate burden, and this covers redistributing the core duties of a role, not only peripheral tasks. The employer cannot be required to create a different job. And a person who can be reasonably accommodated is to be treated as capable of doing the job.
Here is the part I got wrong in my own head before I read it properly, and it matters. There is no free-standing legal obligation to consult the person. The Supreme Court was explicit about that. What it said instead is that a wise employer will provide meaningful participation, and the employer must be able to demonstrate that it fully considered the accommodation question.
Which is the same destination by a different road. Consultation is the evidence that you considered the question at all, and an employer who never asked has nothing to demonstrate with.
The failure mode is deciding in your head that the candidate would not cope with the on-call rota, and never asking them. That decision leaves no record, and a record is exactly what you need when someone later asks what you considered.
Which brings us back to "we treat every candidate the same." Identical treatment is the mechanism here rather than a defence against it. The statute allows for more favourable treatment where that is what levels access to the job: adjusted hours, partial remote work, a different assessment format.
What this means for an engineering hiring loop
None of this is legal advice. It is what I would change if I ran the loop.
- Put the alternative formats on the job ad. Take-home, pairing session, questions in advance, stated as options before anyone has to disclose anything to get them. This is the highest-leverage change on the list, because the NAS survey data shows only 3% of people who disclosed on their application were offered an alternative process. Nobody is asking. They are withdrawing instead.
- When an adjustment is requested, respond in writing and ask what would help. Rather than proposing your own guess at it.
- Document the assessment even when you say yes. Especially when you say yes. It establishes that a process exists.
- Never let a rejection reason be the accommodation. "Struggled in the whiteboard round" for a candidate you refused a take-home is a bad fact pattern in front of an adjudication officer.
- Brief the panel. An engineer who says "we treat everyone the same" out loud in an interview has created evidence.
Check the funding before you plead cost
Section 16 expects public funding to be considered before an employer pleads cost. Since 30 July 2024 the scheme is Work and Access, administered by the Department of Social Protection, which replaced the Reasonable Accommodation Fund and the Disability Awareness Support Scheme.
Two figures I could corroborate across gov.ie, Citizens Information and the National Enterprise Hub: a Workplace Needs Assessment of up to €2,500, carried out by a qualified specialist such as an occupational therapist, and a Workplace Adaptation Grant of up to €25,000 for adapting premises, which requires a needs assessment first. There is also a Work Equipment Grant for assistive equipment and technology, including for remote workers, and support for staff training. The maximum amounts quoted for the equipment grant and the training support conflict between sources, so check the current operational guidelines before you budget anything.
The uptake on the predecessor schemes was low enough that the Department reviewed them. Ask your HR function whether they have ever applied.
The part that is mine
All of the above only starts once somebody tells you. And that is the part I can speak about without citing anyone.
Asking for an adjustment means telling a stranger something about yourself that you cannot take back, before you have any evidence about how they will use it. You are making a bet on how one person will interpret a diagnosis, in a process where they are also deciding whether to hire you, and in a market where you have probably been burned before.
I know what that calculation feels like from the inside. Not asking has a known, bounded cost: I do the whiteboard round badly and I probably do not get the job. Asking has an unbounded one, because I have no idea what happens to that information afterwards, or which of the four people in the loop hears about it, or how it is worded when they do. Most people take their chances with the whiteboard, and you never find out what you missed.
Which is why the fix cannot be a better disclosure form. Offer the adjustments by default, route requests to someone who is not deciding on the hire, and state in the ad which formats are available. You end up with a process that produces better signal on every candidate, and the accommodation question mostly stops being a separate conversation.
I am an engineer, not a solicitor. For anything with real money attached, get proper advice.
Question for anyone hiring in Dublin or elsewhere in the EU: has your company ever actually applied for a Work and Access grant, or is it in the same drawer as the Employment Equality Acts poster nobody reads? I would like to know whether the low uptake is due to HR not knowing, or to engineering never asking.
Bruno Souza
Senior Backend Engineer — Dublin
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