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

I thank the Minister for his reply. The current Taoiseach promised that the legal right would be delivered before he left his role as Minister for enterprise, so the Minister present might forgive me if I am a little bit sceptical about the Government's intention in this regard. The Minister says he wants to make remote working a feature. Remote working is a feature of work at the moment. In fact, I have long argued that it should be recognised as a specific form of work, like shift work is, because it is a very specific form of work. At the moment, we have the worst of all worlds because there are workers who cannot put a permanent arrangement in place. They are on week-to-week or month-to-month arrangement because there is not a code of practice. There are employers who, to be fair to many of them, want to do the right thing but are waiting for this code of practice. I would like to hear some sense of urgency.

To be fair to the Minister's predecessor, he was all about the sense of urgency and nothing about the action, but we need to see this commenced as soon as possible. I would welcome to hear from the Minister that he understands there are workers now, some of whom are being forced back into the office and do not want to do so and others who want to put their working arrangement on to a permanent footing because they have to deal with childcare and everything else. They do not sense that there is any urgency coming from the Government. To be very clear, it is urgent for those people who need it.

See this speech in context