“Your Role Has Changed”

It arrives in the welcome-back meeting, delivered warmly: “while you were out, things evolved.” The reports now report elsewhere; the project has an owner; the title survives but the job inside it has been quietly rehoused. The returner is expected to be grateful there’s a job at all. The statute expects something else entirely: the same job, on terms no less favourable — and the gap between those two expectations is one of Irish employment law’s busiest dispute zones.

The Right, Precisely

The Maternity Protection Acts’ default is the job you held — substance, not label. Only where that is not reasonably practicable may a suitable alternative be offered, and both limbs carry real content: the threshold must actually be met (the reorganisation that consumed exactly one role — yours — invites the timing scrutiny this whole cluster runs on), and “suitable” is measured against what you had. The kept-title-hollowed-role manoeuvre fails the substance test; the evidence that proves it is the before-and-after inventory: reports, budgets, projects, clients — itemised, dated.

The Sentence That Keeps Everything Alive

The returner’s tactical trap is binary thinking — swallow it or storm out — and both branches lose: acceptance ratifies, resignation converts the claim into constructive dismissal, the hardest route on this site, before easier ones were tested. The third way is working under written protest: the email confirming you’re taking up the assigned duties while formally disputing that they comply with your return-to-work rights. Income continues, the claim is preserved, nothing is ratified — and the employer must now respond on paper.

Three Routes, One Conversation

The mapped options: the Maternity Protection complaint for the breached return right; gender discrimination where the diminishment connects to pregnancy or leave — shifted burden, compensation to two years’ remuneration; constructive dismissal only where advice says the situation truly qualifies, and always before resigning. Cooling that follows your complaint adds victimisation — its own claim, this site’s native ground. The clocks are the WRC’s usual six-to-twelve months: mapped here. Bring the before-and-after list; the route conversation is one call.