Mr. Dermot Mulligan:

The Minister asked us to look at whether we can ensure that the grounds for refusal are more than merely procedural. We are looking to see what that looks like and whether it is possible to operationalise that without creating a right to have remote working granted. What we are trying to create is a right to request remote work, but not a right to have remote work. How does one craft the legislation to do the former but not the latter? For example, it has been suggested that perhaps in looking at an employer's refusal it is whether one could look at that with some type of reasonableness test, or on objective grounds whether it was reasonable and so forth. What we are looking at currently is whether it is possible to do that from a constitutional point of view without infringing the constitutional rights of a business owner and without actually creating a right to have remote working as opposed to a right to request remote working.