Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will not oppose this motion. I admire greatly the commitment of Senator Currie to the whole concept of remote working. To me, it is something that will obviously be part of our future to a greater extent than was ever envisaged. As Senator Currie stated, the process has been dynamised by the Covid-19 lockdowns as people are beginning to see it is possible to work remotely and to shift work from centralised bases.

I also believe it is a question of introducing flexibility and freedoms into our economy. As somebody who is a liberal by nature and also pro-enterprise, I believe there are huge positives to remote working and to its espousal by many enterprises in Ireland. I fully accept what Senators McGahon and Currie said about the infrastructural basis of it, especially in the context of our roll-out of broadband nationally and the creation of hubs. Those are important issues.

I want to say a few things, though, by way of caution. It is very simple to get enthusiastic about a project and see none of the downsides of it. I am not at all saying that critically of the proposer or seconder of this motion. I will make a number of points, however.

I heard the Tánaiste speak about introducing the right to remote working. In the context of most private sector employment, the right to do something, as opposed to a partnership agreement between employer and employee, is a crucial concept. We cannot have people saying they are off and will not be at their workplace and will work from home. There must be a realisation that some dynamics in organisations require the congregation of people, whether they are in local hubs or central hubs. One of the things I did when I was Minister with responsibility for justice was to move a number of State agencies to various places outside Dublin. For example, I relocated the Prison Service to County Longford. There was a great deal of scepticism at the time as to whether they could actually work properly, and there still is in respect of some of them.

I will also make the point - the Minister of State may agree with this proposition - that a Minister running a Department on occasion needs a centralised hub of people who are available almost immediately when a crisis breaks. One cannot just try to assemble people on a Zoom call over 12 or 18 hours in order to respond to a situation. There are critical requirements even in the public service, and there always will be.

There will definitely be cases in small and medium enterprises where it is unthinkable that one would confer a right to work remotely on an employee and put the employer in the position of saying that person has to like it or lump it. Particular problems would arise from that. Therefore, in the private sector as opposed to the public sector, where public administration is different in character, there must be a partnership approach.

I also raise the point about socialisation. We say that our children must go to school for socialisation purposes, that their education must be centralised and that they must meet each other. There is a socialisation aspect to employment and that is acknowledged in the strategy document. One cannot just simply spread people all over the place and thereby create a situation where they never meet each other and where the power of employers might be unacceptably magnified.

I ask people to also remember that accessibility to a place where one actually wants to do business is extremely important, as is direct interaction with people. Those of us who have seen our bank branches evaporate over the past ten years and been told to contact a call centre in Belfast or further afield now know what it is like to try to do something in the absence of direct interaction.With many State agencies the position is the same. One is dealing with people who are not accessible and one cannot sit down across a table and discuss one's problem with them. Let us remember that.

I agree with Senator Currie that the carrot, rather than the stick, is the approach to take with all of this. On commuting, one of the more amusing comments made by one Member was that people could commute on their bicycles from Kildare. I thought of what it would be like to commute by bicycle from Kildare during the last week. Commuting eats up whole swathes of people's lives, even in the greater Dublin area. Traffic jams and so on destroy people's daily lives if they also have to bring kids to crèches and schools, get food in the evening, collect kids, visit elderly parents and all the rest. The crippling experience of commuting is something we must try to minimise.

This is a good motion and I support it but we should also look around a few corners. There are some aspects of remote working which will need to be carefully balanced, rather than remote working simply being accepted in a naive and over-enthusiastic way.