Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will speak to my amendments. We debated this over and back with the Minister of State, Deputy English, on Committee Stage. He said that he would go back and reflect on some of the measures. This element of the Bill is a non-starter for us. We introduced our own sick pay legislation through Private Member's business two years ago. As Deputy Murphy quite rightly said, the pandemic now appears to be mostly over, yet we are still in a situation where we have not legislated for it. As we constantly said in the committee room, in every other EU country that has statutory sick pay, most have free GP care. It is imbalanced to talk purely about sick pay when other elements within society do not stand up in the context of the worker. It was also instructive to me, and I believe to other members of the committee, how much the weight of conversation in the committee room was about the employer, the employer, the employer. That is understandable but we really want to talk about the worker who is sick and who, therefore, feels that he or she has to go to work even when sick. Let us imagine being in that position where you really feel it is going to hurt you so badly in their pocket that you must pretend to be well to go to work. On that basis, we strongly feel that the Minister's intention to go from three to ten days over an ill-defined period is not strong enough. We want to start at ten days with the ambition to go to 30 days, which would be in keeping with a modern, decent republic. This is why we feel so strongly about it. I withdrew my amendments on Committee Stage, as did other colleagues, in order to resubmit them on Report Stage. I intend to press amendment No. 3 to a vote.

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