Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will ask a couple of questions after making an observation. I tabled a number of amendments that have been ruled out of order. Amendment No. 39 would have transposed into this Bill the Organisation of Working Time (Domestic Violence Leave) Bill 2020, which was sponsored by Deputy McDonald and me. The Bill was not opposed by the Government, so I do not understand why my amendment has been ruled out of order. I suppose the Minister will tell me that not opposing the Bill is not the same as supporting it, and he would be dead right, but the amendment sought to transpose the essence of that Bill into this one.

The Minister has chosen to amend the Parental Leave Act rather than, as stakeholders have requested of Sinn Féin, the Organisation of Working Time Act, which is primarily where measures on leave are housed. Amending it would have been much easier. Dr. Duvvury spoke about this, as did the University of Galway's HR department when the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, and I launched its domestic violence leave policy. The HR people were content that the leave would be housed within the Organisation of Working Time Act.

Given that a leave period of ten days was Fianna Fáil policy for a long time and is the policy of the Minister's own party in the North, will he explain where halving that came from? Will he give me clear sight of what is going to happen to people in the public service where a policy of ten days has already been adopted? Is that period to be cut back to five or is he creating a two-tiered entitlement? This worries me. I cannot understand where the figure of five came from, given that the norm within the sector is, as Deputy Cairns has pointed out, ten. The stakeholders to whom we spoke said that ten should be the minimum. Up until last Thursday when this Bill was produced, ten was the Government's policy. I launched the University of Galway's policy with the Minister, Deputy Harris. He subsequently wrote to the universities, all of which are in the public service, advising them to adopt a similar policy. I am a bit confused as to why the entitlement that had been spoken about to date and had, as I understood matters, been party policy among the three Government parties has been halved.