Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Parents in this country are under pressure. The cost of accommodation is out of control and out of the reach of too many. Child care bills are rising. There is no sign of any incremental progress on the extension of general practitioner, GP, care for children on which we were making progress. The modern workplace puts enormous pressure on parents. They fight to sustain their careers and raise their families but the recent budget did little for those parents. There was no increase in child benefit. Crèches raised their prices. There was no subsidy increase on child care and nothing to address the ever-rising price of a home. They got tax cuts that cost them money because they have to pay more for the basic services the State should be providing from health care to child care to education.

Last week, the ESRI made it official. It did not get much notice, but its study on the distributional impact of tax and welfare in the last budget confirmed that it would not even give the price of a cup of coffee. Instead, it would cost people. It shows all income groups will suffer losses, with the lowest income groups being hardest hit and the best off losing least. Families with a single earner lose most. In an economy where the cost of everything is increasing and where wages are not rising fast enough, people will be worse off. In a recovering economy, that is some achievement.

There are actions that could be taken that would give parents a break. Parents in Ireland have the right to 18 weeks of unpaid parental leave. For many, that leave is absolutely necessary to care for a sick child or other issues, but it is at a huge cost. A Programme for a Partnership Government states that the Government will increase paid parental leave in the first year of birth. In the manifesto for leadership that the Taoiseach produced, he said he would improve and extend contributory benefits such as parental leave. He said something similar in his address to the Fine Gael national conference recently, yet The Sunday Timesreported last weekend, in a report written by Valerie Flynn, that the Government wants to delay the implementation of the new European Union law that would give Irish workers the right to four months of paid parental leave. An Irish official was reported to have said that the Irish Government has reservations about these matters.

My question is a simple one. Why, on the one hand, is the Government saying it wants to give paid parental leave when, on the other, behind closed doors in Brussels, it is saying the opposite? Will the Government introduce four months of paid parental leave as is being discussed in the EU directive, and when will it do so?

See this speech in context