Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have a few practical questions on that. When the Minister is doing this, can he make it easier for parents to formally set childminders up as employees, or whatever mechanism is appropriate? People are not used to doing that and to creating businesses. It is relatively straightforward but is not easy. People want to be compliant and to ensure that everything is done correctly, so I ask that the Minister might remember that point.

There is also an ongoing question on the status of au pairsas people are not sure what that will mean for the future.

I will return to the point about flexibility and it is related to his other piece of work on gender equality. One of the points that arises - and I acknowledge that the Minister has done the work on the gender pay gap - and has a big impact potentially on flexibility and gender equality is the need to look at the culture of organisations. This is how parents of both genders can go in and request flexible working four-day weeks instead of what has happened traditionally, where women go in looking for a three-day week and a man stays at a five-day week, with all of the implications that has. The Minister now has a model through the gender pay gap reporting mechanism. Can we think about how we could extend that to look at how often men are looking for flexible working also - whether that can be documented and noted in annual reports or anything of that kind - to try to get a picture of what that might look like for the future?

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