Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. I acknowledge the amount of work within the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act the Minister referenced. It includes five days of unpaid leave for parents for medical care purposes. It also includes five days' leave for the victims of domestic violence we are discussing this evening. It further includes the right to request flexible working for parents and carers and the right to request remote working for all employees. It also includes two years of breast-feeding breaks.

If I talked about paternal leave, for example, there is something of a cultural handbrake around people availing of it properly. We absolutely need to financially underpin people who need to take that jump to get out of an abusive relationship and we need to ensure they are not trapped in those relationships by dint of financial restrictions. However, we also need to normalise paid provisions. I am not talking about domestic violence leave now. We must normalise those other paid provisions so people take them up. We need to avoid a cultural handbrake and ensure no stigma is attaching to availing of these payments so that people can really avail of them.

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