Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

It is not lost on us that the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill is being debated at 9.40 p.m. on a Wednesday night. It certainly says everything about not having a good work life balance. I pick up on the point that Deputy Funchion made. There is good reason to have five stages to legislation. It means it has been thought out and teased out, that the principle of it has been talked about, that amendments have been tabled and considered on Committee Stage and reported back to the Dáil. There is then a further debate on it and if something needs to be amended at Report Stage it is possible to do it. There is a purpose in doing that, which is to ensure we have good, solid, robust legislation that is future-proofed. A massive opportunity is being missed here. Essentially what has happened is the Tánaiste’s legislation has been binned. It was awful legislation. I would have looked for it to be withdrawn and recrafted anyway. However, we are going to miss an opportunity in doing that because there was the possibility of doing something very constructive.

I do not understand what the mindset is that would consider this six-month rule, that it does not apply until six months. That is almost a negative. That should be something that is embraced in legislation that is adopting a different kind of culture of remote working as an entitlement and a benefit. As I said when I spoke earlier, one of those benefits is very much a climate benefit. It is a regional balance benefit. That is the huge lost opportunity.

Will the Minister address the issue of what was the thinking in regard to the six-months provision? For the life of me I cannot think of anything other than a paternalistic approach, as Deputy O’Reilly said, that it is assumed that people must be kept an eye on for six months to see if they are working out and then maybe let them work remotely. It is that supervisory, old-fashioned way of doing things. When you look at the analysis done during Covid-19 on people who worked remotely in actual fact it was the reverse of what you might think. Productivity went up, not down. People worked longer than the set hours. This notion that people must be stood over to make sure they are good employees is not the kind of culture we should be trying to adopt in a good work life balance or in terms of crafting legislation creating an environment for working remotely.

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