Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have to take my share of the blame.

I am glad to have an opportunity to contribute to the debate and to address the important issue of parental leave. This Bill proposes to expand the parental leave entitlement from 18 to 26 weeks, which is welcome. I am broadly supportive of the Bill. The Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection recently announced that she plans to provide in the 2019 budget for an additional two weeks of paid leave for each parent of a newborn child in that child's first year of life. We should support any legislative measure that allows parents to spend more time with their children without causing them financial disadvantage or having a negative impact on their careers outside the home. We have to acknowledge the importance of parental contact in a child's life, particularly in the early stages. It is a clear social good. The State should always work to put the best framework in place to allow families to have the space to make these kinds of decisions for themselves. Proposals involving childcare and related issues are too often treated as matters for social engineering. Several proposals we heave heard from the Minister, Deputy Zappone, in recent years are examples of this. I will not deviate into that now. I note that Government and Opposition parties are fond of saying that families come in many shapes and sizes. They do this to the exclusion of a proper consideration of what is in the best interests of children. We all need to recognise that it is up to families, particularly parents, to regulate how best to structure childcare arrangements.

While I support this Bill, we need to take it a step further. I would like to propose a small but valuable amendment to this proposal to that end. The key thread that needs to run through all legislation and policy in areas such as parental leave and childcare is that it should be up to parents and families to decide how best to arrange family life. For that reason, we need to consider amending the Parental Leave Act 1998 to give parents the option of dividing and assigning their paid and unpaid parental leave weeks between them as they see fit. At present, parents are entitled to separate untransferable leave only. It is interesting - I do not know whether it can be attributed to gender theory or to the wilder reaches of feminism - that there is a belief these days that there is no difference between men and women, or that the differences between men and women are socially constructed. It seems contradictory that there is an insistence that men and women must take parental leave. Rather than relying on some of the meanderings of gender theory or the wilder reaches of feminism, I prefer to rely on what I consider to be a common sense approach. It is a matter for families, having regard to their particular circumstances, to make informed decisions on what works for them, depending on their aptitudes, their relative income power or whatever the issue is.

It is interesting that if both the mother and father of a child work for the same employer, with the consent of that employer, one of them may transfer up to 14 of the 18 weeks of parental leave to the other. Is this about facilitating the needs of employers? I wonder whether it emerged when these issues were examined through the lens of what the employer wants, as opposed to what the family needs. We need to extend the limited transferability provision to make the transfer of leave entitlements more widely available. By providing for a system of transferable leave for all parents, we would give parents the flexibility to structure their parenting schedules in a way that is most convenient to them. As I have said, decisions on the division of parental leave should be made by families because they are best placed to make such decisions. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Parents know what is best for their personal circumstances. I ask the sponsors of the Bill, or the Government, to consider proposing an amendment to it that would amend the Parental Leave Act 1998 to allow parents to have the choice I have outlined.

Mar fhocal scoir, we spoke some months ago about the proposal to remove the constitutional provision relating to women's place in the home. That proposal has been shunted off to the sidelines. It was interesting to hear rhetoric from the Government that sought to denigrate those who framed our Constitution on the basis of some kind of misogynistic intent. That is a really ahistorical view. A more historical understanding of the times which led to that provision would appreciate that families were under significant economic pressure at the time and that this would have been a positive provision if it had been properly fleshed out in social measures. Rather than taking the easy luxury of engaging in virtue signalling by referring to such provisions as misogynistic, it is harder to work to change that amendment to recognise that men and women, through their lives within the home, including the upbringing of children, do the State an important service.That view has gained some traction and it has led to the initial simplistic rhetoric from the Government about this being a misogynistic provision. At least we have had some pause by virtue of some people saying that this might not be so straight forward. It also leads into the other issues around caring in the home, of which we are all aware. It is not just parenting and the role of parents within the home which we need to value, but also the roles of people who provide unpaid care in the home. I speak with some knowledge of this myself. Those people provide a huge service to the State, and indeed to our common humanity.

I hope that we can move towards a more fleshed out, nuanced debate about the common good in that area, and I would be grateful if people would take on board the suggestions made today around allowing parents and families more flexibility to determine what is in their own best interests.