Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I join others in supporting this positive legislation, which the Minister has been leading in his Department for some time. It transposes various elements of EU work-life balance directives and also provides rights to parents and carers to help support a better work-life balance.

Under this Bill, parents and carers will see several improvements. The first of these is a right to request flexible working, including the right to request compressed or reduced hours. Five days of annual leave for serious medical care are also being introduced, as well as the extension, from six months to two years, of current entitlements to breast-feeding and lactation breaks under the maternity protection Acts. As other Members commented, this legislation also sees the introduction of paid leave for victims of domestic violence. We have given examples of other countries where this happens and of best practice in this regard. This is a good starting point and one I hope will be improved upon. Supports are also provided for employers to develop domestic violence workplace policies.

I was struck by several things in the Bill. Before I was elected to Dáil Éireann, I was a schoolteacher. In our school, and in most schools, there are policies that set limits or caps on how many people can seek job sharing in a given year. This is not intended to be mean or vindictive or anything like that. It is just for operational reasons in a school. When someone in a school is job sharing, the teachers change over mid-week. It works well from the children's learning perspective of children because there is a certain energy involved with this set-up. It is also onerous, however,. It is necessary for teachers to exchange notes, assessments etc. Therefore, schools find job sharing provision a bit onerous and they generally cap its availability for that reason. In a typical large-school environment, only two or three job shares might be allowed in a particular year. Obviously, legislation passed by the Houses of the Oireachtas would supersede that, but from an operational perspective, it would be good to consider this point as the next Stages of the Bill get under way. Teaching may be unique in this regard. I do not know if there are many other employment settings where there are caps or limitations on job sharing. This happens for operational reasons in teaching, and therefore it would be good if it might be possible to find an hour in the week to chat with representatives of the INTO and other unions to determine why this stricture is in place and to explore if there might be a way of not banjaxing schools' work schedules while also fully enshrining the spirit of this law the Minister is trying to introduce.

The four-day working week was mentioned by some speakers as well. The Government has tinkered with this idea. I think it was the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Varadkar, who last year set up a working group to explore this concept. It was trialled in Spain for a time as well. There was much fanfare associated with that experiment. I think every radio show in the country had callers who were excited by this concept. The working group got its endeavours underway, but we have not heard much about it since. This is another crucial aspect in the context of work-life balance. People want to work but also to live. We would love to hear what is coming back from that working group. Employers would also. They have many concerns in this regard. This is not a part of this legislation, but it is something that has had people on tenterhooks while they have been waiting to hear more about what might be happening next in this regard.

Turning to remote working, this has been transformative in rural counties, especially during Covid-19. I hope I get this number right, but I think we have 14 remote working digital hubs in County Clare now. I worked in them occasionally during the pandemic. The Minister is from what is pretty much an urban constituency. In rural constituencies during the pandemic, such as mine in the west of County Clare, remote working meant I was able to be back there doing clinics and also able to log into a committee meeting in the Oireachtas in the afternoon. I used to stop the car, but it was never possible to get a good signal. It would be necessary to stop in a remote working digital hub instead. For the cost of €5, it was then possible to go in and full facilities and comforts were available there, including tea and coffee refreshments. While looking out at the Wild Atlantic Way in County Clare, therefore, it was possible to log in and connect to a meeting in central Dublin. Indeed, it was possible to be connected globally to people working, transacting and doing everything they needed to do. That was a transformative experience. County Clare happens to have the most remote working digital hubs of any of our counties, but I would love to see more of this type of activity.

This is positive legislation. I wish it well in future. I have heard some constructive contributions from the floor so far. As a teacher, I ask the Minister to engage with the employment bodies and the INTO to see if there is any way this legislation can be made to work operationally in schools. I ask this because, and this is hard to imagine, if there were a school of 20 teachers and all them were job sharing, then that would mean there was suddenly a staff of 40. It would become a tricky situation to manage, I would say. We want this Bill to work. Therefore, a little dialogue would help this legislation. I hope some of these considerations can be factored into the next Stages of this legislation as it progresses. I have finished my contribution and I will return to the Chair.

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