Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)

The most telling lines in the explanatory memorandum for this legislation read as follows:

As parental leave is unpaid, this cost will not be significant. There will be benefits for employers and industry. The legislation will facilitate the increased participation and retention of women in the workforce.

That gives us an insight to the basis of the legislation. The provision alone should not be read as a family-friendly initiative. While increasing parental leave is a first step in the right direction, the Parental Leave (Amendment) Bill has quite a negative feel to it. While it purports to protect new parents from being penalised for taking time off to care for their children, it does not provide for adequately flexible child care and parental leave options and does not provide additional financial assistance.

If the Parental Leave Bill is truly intended as a family friendly document it should tackle the cause of the increase in the numbers of late pregnancies. Looking at some of the documentation in the British Medical Journal, for example, and the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, there has been a major increase in the number of women delaying their pregnancies beyond the age of 35.

It is important to consider such studies when we look at how policy is affecting the longer-term costs. It is easy to calculate what leave of ten or 20 weeks will cost in today's terms but when one looks, for example, at the increase in the incidence of high blood pressure and diabetes in women in the post-35 group, and certainly those over 40, a health care cost is involved, and a cost to the individual. Our lack of understanding of why people are choosing to postpone pregnancies until much later has a long-term consequence with which we are not adequately dealing.

We need a strategy for dealing with families. While we have a reputation for being a family friendly country, it is difficult to see where our policies tie in with that reputation. Most families now have only two children — the average being a little above that, so over the employment lifetime of perhaps 40 or 50 years we are talking of quite a small cost for this particular initiative. There is no reason why there should not be a payment in respect of that.

One of the most stressful times for people is when a new baby arrives. Due to the costs of accommodation, commuting and furnishing homes, people often postpone having babies until their financial environments are less pressurised. However, late pregnancies can bring risks including Down's syndrome, the incidence of which among children of 30 year-old mothers is one in 1,000 but one in 30 in the case of 45 year-old mothers. Ways should be explored to ensure workers who take time off to care for children are not penalised and the role of families should be re-considered.

When I was a member of the Commission on the Family during the mid-1990s, my eyes were damaged from the amount of material I was required to read. The financial pressures on society has changed vastly in the ten years since that commission finished its work. We need to move on by understanding the influence of public policy on the choices people make. Yesterday, during discussions with the Committee on Finance and the Public Service, members of Congress noted the significant increases that will apply to the cost of pensions if the birth rate does not increase. Issues such as these need to be factored into long-term planning. Finances currently dominate the choices that people make because the Government is trying to resolve issues on the cheap.

We are out of kilter with most European countries in terms of parental leave payment, which should be a given in any genuinely family friendly society. I hope the Government will take the opportunity on Committee Stage to put forward amendments to that aspect of the Bill because, in the absence of payments, opportunities are limited to the small number of people who can afford to take time off.

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