Jillian van Turnhout (Independent) | Oireachtas source

This is a fact and any employer who speaks honestly will say this. Making this change with regard to parental leave would encourage and enable women to remain in the workforce after they have children by taking and sharing leave entitlements with their partner.

Ireland has a birthrate of 16.2% which is the highest in Europe and these children are our future labour force and contributors to our pension fund. We know supporting a healthy birth rate is very important. I will contrast this with Germany, which has a birthrate of 8.1% which is the lowest birth rate in the EU. A connection has been drawn between its maternity leave arrangements, which in effect saw female employees getting sucked into an inequitable model of child care and losing their career footing after spending lengthy periods of leave in one go, and a slump in the birthrate. In 2007 the system was overhauled to encourage fathers to take up more parental leave.

Sweden has a very flexible parental leave system and either working parent can take and share an entitlement of 16 months paid leave per child at 80% of salary. This cost is divided between the state and the employer. Norway has a paternal quota scheme. Norwegian parents may take 46 weeks of parental leave at 100% pay or 56 weeks at 80% pay, with three weeks before and six weeks after birth reserved for the mother, while ten weeks of total parental leave is reserved for the father.

All these systems reinforce the importance of the first year of a child's life, which has been shown by research, and also shows the importance of balancing between the father and mother. I am concerned because there is a gender bias throughout our legislation. If we look at current parental leave only if the parents work for the same employer can they look to share their parental leave entitlements. The Government has stated it plans to reform this area and bring us into line with the European directives allowing parental leave to be interchanged between new parents.

We need to be ambitious. I understand the economic climate we are in, but when we examine legislation we should aim for where we wish to go. We want gender equality in caring responsibilities and I would like to see a paternal quota and not a mother's entitlement to give leave to the father. We should clearly state in legislation that fathers have a role. In Sweden if the father does not take up the leave it is lost. This means employers look at men and women in the same way and it ensures the leave is taken.

I suggest we also examine and include adoptive leave.