Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Teachta as ucht an deis labhairt faoi seo. I am taking this on behalf of the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, and the Minister, Deputy Peter Burke. I know the House will join with me in expressing our sympathies to the Minister on the passing of his mother.

As the Deputy indicated, statutory sick leave is a valuable public health intervention. It reduces the risk of workplace accidents and curtails infectious disease transmission. It is one of a number of measures this Government has introduced to protect workers. The phased introduction of the scheme was designed to achieve a balance between responding to the cost concerns of employers by giving them time to adjust and plan for the new responsibility, while offering workers, often those in low-paid, precarious roles and disproportionately younger people and women, as Deputy O'Reilly said, certainty about their rights.

It is important to recognise, however, that providing new employment rights protections involves increased costs for employers. Members of the business community, including many SMEs, have shared their concerns about the cumulative costs of providing new rights for workers, including statutory sick leave. To respond to these concerns and assess as fully as possible the impact of any potential further increases to sick leave, research is being conducted on the impact of sick leave to date. My Department worked with the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, on the first phase of this research, which is now completed. This work resulted in the identification of certain informational and data gaps, including data required to identify workers and firms who are currently covered by a company sick pay policy. To bridge some of these gaps, my Department commissioned a specialist market research company to conduct a firm-level survey, representative of the sectoral and size distribution of Irish companies. The results of the survey have now been received and that data is currently being analysed by officials from the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service.

In addition, officials in my Department are also working on qualitative research, including conducting one-to-one interviews with employers across a wide range of company types and sectors as well as employee representatives. This qualitative work will be used to provide more in-depth insights into the impact of the Sick Leave Act 2022. Furthermore, a stakeholder workshop was held at the end of September with regard to this. It is expected that the findings from this research, both quantitative and qualitative, along with an assessment of the wider factors enumerated in section 6 of the Sick Leave Act, including the state of the economy and society generally, will be made available for the Minister's to consider in the coming weeks.

It is important to note that this is a relatively new form of research. The Sick Leave Act itself has only been in operation since January 2023 and a comprehensive analysis of the sick pay landscape has not been undertaken to date in Ireland.

Once the Department and the Minister, Deputy Peter Burke, have received this evidence, he will give appropriate consideration to a decision on the further roll-out of the statutory sick leave scheme. We are cognisant in the Department that businesses and workers need certainty. It is worth noting, however, that, as per section 6(2) of the Act, we cannot make a regulation to vary the statutory sick leave entitlements before 1 January 2025.

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