Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss the Microenterprise Loan Fund (Amendment) Bill 2020 today and the emphasis on the July jobs stimulus. The sectors that have been most affected are retail, leisure, hospitality and tourism. I also mention the youth and the regions in rural Ireland in terms of the effect the lack of tourism will have on them.

We have talked about home working and one third of us have been working from home throughout the crisis. We have been juggling home schooling, home working and home rearing and the pressure there has been on women in that regard has been acknowledged. Despite the challenges, over half of the population wants to see us change the way we work and make this a more permanent arrangement because of the benefits to our quality of life. It reflects the pressures people have been under in recent years with commuting, working long hours and managing home life. The benefits are there for the environment and for employee retention and productivity but I want to specifically mention communities and the economic potential for rural Ireland and suburban communities of people working remotely. There is potential to breathe life into suburban communities and into rural Ireland.

I welcome the public consultation that has been announced and I want to focus on the opportunities as well as the challenges. One of my suggestions is that a task force would be set up between companies that are already doing remote working or that want to do it. Some 262,000 people were working remotely before the Covid-19 crisis. I acknowledge the work of Grow Remote, which offers one-to-one assistance to employers and to communities to help them to build a community around remote working. I suggest to employers that if they want to get behind this, they need to advertise remotely. That is the single biggest thing they can do straight away to encourage remote working. We need to review the e-working tax benefit. We have done a campaign on home holidays with Bord Fáilte but what I would also like to see for rural Ireland is a campaign that will focus on people potentially moving to rural Ireland and being able to work remotely. It is a massive opportunity for regional balance and I want to stress the importance of doing this straight away through the July jobs stimulus and then through the economic plan in October.