Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am sorry that I was delayed. I was not expecting this session to start so early. On the maternity leave, there are two issues.

If a person does not go back to work but is available for work, does he or she get the Covid payment? The second is the possibility of extended maternity leave being introduced. I understand that would take legislation. The Minister might tell me if it would not. The argument in favour of it is that when one has a new baby, there is no childcare available at present and in a lot of cases grandparents cannot look after their children because they are over a certain age and they are meant to be socially isolating, or they are more than 5 km or 50 km apart. Has the Minister considered extending maternity leave as well as making people who are on maternity leave eligible for the Covid payment?

I do not understand the anomaly that the Minister has just outlined where an employer can avail of the temporary wage subsidy scheme for an employee who is over 66, but that person cannot get the pandemic unemployment payment.

Has the Minister given consideration to reintroducing the mortgage interest supplement for people who will be unemployed because of Covid? I got a long answer talking about the goodwill of banks. Banks do not show a lot of goodwill to an awful lot of people. The mortgage interest supplement which would have been paid during the period of enforced unemployment would have been a significant safety net for people.

The final matter is very important along the west coast. It relates to those who are never employed in February and early March because they are involved in seasonal tourism. They earn their living normally from either St. Patrick's Day or from Easter until the back end of the year, probably as far as deireadh seachtaine na Samhna. What will be available for them other than jobseeker's allowance? Will they be able to prove that that was their employment pattern? Will they be entitled to this revised Covid payment? If they are not, they are at a significant disadvantage and it will decimate those areas, such as Killarney, Connemara, Donegal, Mayo etc.

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