Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I propose to share time with Deputies Tully and Kerrane. Having become the father of a baby boy nine months ago, I have experience of what it was like to have a newborn during lockdown. Our baby got his four-months injections before lockdown and his six-months injections during it. I hope that by the time he gets his 12-months injections the world will be a different and better place, although it is hard not to feel that we will still be facing a challenging time.

There have been good and bad elements to having a newborn in the time of Covid. There were two of us working from home most of the time. Arranging meetings and trying to avoid a clash of Zoom schedules and things like that while also looking after a school-age child and a newborn was no joke. However, there is no doubt that there also were upsides. For example, I got to spend a lot more time with the baby than I would have in normal circumstances. I have had contact from many parents, particularly mothers, in regard to the issues raised in our motion. The challenges facing a lot of mothers in this time have been enormous. It is said that it takes a village to raise a child. For many mothers, they did not have access to that village during the pandemic. New mothers feel they did not truly have a maternity leave because there was no access to support. Many were cut off from their child's grandparents, who may have been many miles away. Our son did not see one set of grandparents for several weeks and the other set he did not see for several months. There was no access to breastfeeding groups and reduced access to public health nurses. If their partner was an essential worker, mothers may have felt nearly cut off from the world for a time. The stress of trying to figure out what comes next is something that came up in many of the conversations I had with parents. Childcare is so scarce that it may as well not exist.

I take this opportunity to highlight that parents whose maternity leave elapsed during this crisis have faced incredible challenges. For those who had to return to work, there was no childcare for older children as schools were closed and no access to wider support networks. Women who would otherwise have gone back to work could not do so. For mothers working from home there was the juggling involved in what was, in effect, the requirement to combine full-time parenting with a job and, in some cases, homeschooling. In many instances, parents were reliant on the goodwill of employers, some of whom showed compassion and understanding of how challenging the situation was for their employees. In many cases, however, there was not that understanding on the part of employers. We can multiply these difficulties across a large number of families.

I urge the Government to back this motion. It is absolutely necessary that we extend maternity leave for the cohort of women referred to in the motion. I ask the Government to go further than that and to ensure all women and families have access to childcare and other supports.

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