Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that and the clarification. The Minister is going to double-check it and that is fair enough. With regard to the service requirement for parental leave, parental leave is something that is planned. One does not wake up and suddenly find oneself with a child and eligibility for parental leave, or at least I hope not. Sick leave is different because it happens suddenly. The two are not the same. As I said, I am not hostile to a service requirement being part of it. It just needs to work for the people for whom we want it to work and who probably need it most, including those least likely to be working in secure employment and so forth. I understand there are service requirements for other forms of leave, but this is different. Workers know when they are coming up to an entitlement for parental leave, while they might not necessarily know when they are going to be sick. The point is that the two things are not the same.

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