Mr. John Boyle:

We have concerns about cases where a teacher who is absent and self-isolating, thankfully for him or her, tests negative. If that were to recur a number of times in a year, since the public service sick leave scheme was quartered during the previous recession, it would not take long to result in the teacher being on half pay or potentially no pay due to Covid-19. That is something we simply would not tolerate. At the moment, we are keeping a watching brief. Covid leave is available to those who have tested positive or who are deemed to have to self-isolate but the difficulty may arise in the case of teachers who were off work for a short number of days because were that to happen regularly throughout the year, the number of absences would accumulate.

We are also worried, as I mentioned earlier, about those teachers who are pregnant and whose medical practitioners recommend that they not return to work. We have asked for the guidance of the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, HPSC, to be reviewed. We heard some evidence from Dr. Kevin Kelleher of the National Public Health Emergency Team at the stakeholders' meeting yesterday that there is an ongoing review of that guidance. We were promised that it would be reviewed and we engaged with the process throughout the summer in the expectation that we would see the colour of that review. We have heard that the review is ongoing but we have not seen any paper evidence of that. Moving forward into September, we will have to have a detailed review. Given that the World Health Organization and European experts are at variance with the Irish experts, there definitely will have to be some joined-up thinking about this.

As schools continue throughout the winter with the flu season, we cannot have a scenario where workers are penalised in their pay because there has been a pandemic. Hopefully, it will not occur too often, but it is something we are watching closely.