Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I commend the Labour Party on bringing this motion forward. If there is one thing that came out clearly from Covid-19, it is that workers are able to work from home and indeed that for many it gives a far better work-life balance. No sooner had the Tánaiste's right to request remote working Bill been introduced than the Tánaiste said it needed changes to be fit for purpose. I think describing it as not fit for purpose is actually too charitable. It should have been described as dead on arrival. This raises a simple question: why bother even introducing it in the first place? It kind of fooled us. It made us think that the Government was actually a supporter of remote working. Last summer, the Tánaiste wrote an op-ed in The Irish Timesin which he said "The benefits are obvious - less commuting, fewer transport emissions, better quality of life for workers, more time with family and friends." I do not think any workers would dispute those benefits. As has already been pointed, this Bill was not written with workers in mind - it was a Bill written for employers. It was about a right to refuse. It would have been better not to have been written at all because it was so evidently a smokescreen that it was really an insult to many workers' intelligence. It would have been better and more honest if it had just been said that they were fine with people having long commutes and that congestion on our roads is not of concern. Sure what can we do about more pollution? Sure who needs better work-life balance? Did the Tánaiste not say that he is for people who get up early in the morning?

Due to the weaknesses of this Bill, there will be many more people having to get up a hell of a lot earlier in the morning to catch the bus, train or DART or to beat the traffic on the M50, N40 or M6. It has to be said that people will get home much later in the evening as well. With the evenings getting longer, people will be spending more time commuting and there will be more traffic, more pollution and much more stress. It was astonishing to see so much anger in people when the Bill came out because people thought that one thing that came out of Covid was that they could see that things could be done differently. We could see that people can actually work from home and there can be a better work-life balance. However, all of that and all of those lessons that we learned from Covid were completely and utterly ignored. Rather than seeing this as an opportunity to do things differently, that, again, was completely ignored. The Government had an opportunity and it completely missed it. As my colleague Deputy O’Reilly said, there is a difference between not opposing and supporting.

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