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Tony Corrigan, a qualified solicitor who stood as an Independent candidate in the Dublin Central byelection in May, is pursuing employment rights complaints against his former employer, Identity Digital Ltd, at the Workplace Relations Commission.

Corrigan, who worked in a legal role at the internet domain registry company, alleges in a complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act 2014 that he was unfairly sacked in March 2025 because he turned whistleblower the year before.

No details of what was claimed by Corrigan in this alleged protected disclosure were discussed at a preliminary hearing on Monday.

The hearing dealt with legal argument on which of a series of statutory complaints raised under the Unfair Dismissals Act, the Payment of Wages Act and the Employment Equality Act by Corrigan were properly before the commission.

Corrigan said he raised a protected disclosure on June 19th, 2024, and was placed on a performance improvement plan, or “PIP”, on September 10th that year.

He said a disciplinary process was initiated against him the day after the PIP started.

Having taken a period of sick leave that winter, he said the company failed to discharge salary payments in a period between November 2024 and February 2025.

Owen Keany, for the firm, instructed by Sarah Faulkner of Arthur Cox , said Corrigan had made “a series of assertions about alleged wrongdoing on the part of my client” that were “complete fantasy”.

He said the company’s actions in relation to non-payment of sick pay were “perfectly lawful steps” taken in what he said were circumstances of “staggering disengagement in the approach adopted by Mr Corrigan”.

Keany said that since Corrigan had referred his complaints in September 2025, the alleged non-payment of wages complained of was now beyond the normal six-month time limit for such a complaint.

Corrigan argued that the pay matters were a live issue at the time he was dismissed, though adjudication officer Brian Dalton said that “on face value” the pay complaints matters seemed to be out of time.

He also said the law precluded Corrigan pursuing a parallel complaint of discriminatory dismissal under the Employment Equality Act at the same time as alleging a breach of the Unfair Dismissals Act.

Adjudication officer Brian Dalton said he would arrange for two full days to be set aside to hear evidence on the dispute and adjourned the matter.

Corrigan was excluded following the first count in May’s poll, having secured 30 first-preference votes.

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Little is known about Richard Cantillon’s early life beyond the fact that he was born near Ballyheigue, Co Kerry some time after 1680, and as a young man followed the Wild Geese into French exile.

His fame as the “Father of Political Economy” was founded posthumously on a work published 21 years after his death. But while alive, he used his skills to become fabulously wealthy, and was known wherever he went as “the Irish banker”.

Indeed, his reputation for making fortunes when others were losing shirts – notably in the Mississippi Scheme and South Sea Bubble – earned him many enemies.

He was jailed briefly in Paris and spent much of the 1720s fighting litigation. The later obscurity may have derived from the care he took to cover his trails, which were widespread. His success as an investor was built on extensive research and travel, so that he had homes in seven different European capitals: including London, the city that did for him eventually.

Despite all his travels, Cantillon retained Irish tastes, at least in some things. He courted a Kerry woman in exile, Olive Trant; and in 1722 married Mary Anne O’Mahony, the daughter of Count Daniel O’Mahony of Killarney. His wife was beautiful and much younger than he, yet they seem to have been happy for a while, at least until 1733, when he felt the need to send her to a convent for six months.

If the famous banker did stage his death the following year, his wife helped the cover story by promptly marrying her lover.

Cantillon might have gone down in history as just an extreme example of the Cute Kerryman, except for his Essai Sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General). Written in 1730 and published in England in 1755, this influential work expounded his very complex economic theories and was the origin of the term “entrepreneur”. More than a century later, it was hailed as “the veritable cradle of political economy”.

But it was influential from the start, with one account saying, the essay was “shamelessly plagiarised by Postlethwayt (1757), utilised without acknowledgment by Harris (1758), and referred to by Adam Smith (1776)”.

Yet somehow, Cantillon managed to slip back into the shadows and was certainly neglected by his mother country up until recently.

He is a suitable namesake for the long-running column in which Irish Times business journalists endeavour to offer insightful analysis and comment on the business and economic issues of the day.