Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have not considered that, mainly because it is not my area of policy responsibility. That matter would sit with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. I would be reluctant to see this matter dealt with through legislation. It is better off that this is dealt with on an employer-by-employer basis with those who work with them. We have gone through many months of mass-scale home working without this issue of who pays what raising its head in a significant way. That speaks to the common sense that is being used by employers all over the country in working this out. In hundreds of thousands of cases, employees of companies took their laptops home, changed an arrangement at home and managed to work that out with their employer. We have managed to get this far into this phase of Covid-19 without those particular kinds of issues becoming difficult for a large number of employers.

For what it is worth, without going too far off the Finance Bill, I am not so sure that we will see the mass change in office space that we would have speculated might happen a while ago. In many cases, employees will still want to go back into the office. They may want to go back in for considerably less than five days a week. We are going to see offices move away from where there are many offices and workspaces to where there are meeting rooms and collaborative areas. That will involve using the same space, but in a different way. That is already happening. Employers are looking at how they change existing office space to make it a place where their employees want to come in, and to make it into a genuinely collaborative space, as opposed to a place where an employee comes in to do his or her email. That is a discussion for another day.