Lisa Chambers (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I support the motion. It is great to get an opportunity to debate this issue. I am smiling somewhat at the number of Fine Gael speakers who have referred to delivery of broadband. It has been a long road to get to here and we are all obviously friends in government, but it is worth pointing out that Fine Gael were involved in the two previous Governments and that broadband still has not been delivered to Mayo. Many people are still waiting for it. However, I would agree that it is vital for a remote working strategy that people can actually get online. That is something to which the three partners in government are committed. We will finally deliver broadband to every citizen, business and community in this country.

The public has been ahead of us on this matter and remote working is here to stay. It is something that was forced upon us but it has accelerated a change that was happening anyway. People want this, they are demanding it and we have to make it happen. There are many aspects to making this happen but the process is well under way. People want remote working because they want to reduce the stress and anxiety in their lives and achieve a better work-life balance. For many families, while lockdown is very difficult, having that extra time at home and not having to commute an hour or two each way every day and not rushing to the childminder in the morning and evening has meant that people have had a different way of life for the past year. It would be almost impossible to go back to the way things were previously. Thank God for that because I do not think that anybody wants to go back to the stress we had in our lives.

There is a commuter belt around our capital city and more are developing around other cities. Travelling long distances to get to work is having detrimental impacts not only on commuters' mental health, but on the well-being of their families and children, who are missing out on vital family time when both parents, mum and dad, are present together - if they are there - or even in a single-parent household. It is important that parents are present with their children and not absolutely wrecked tired from a long day at work and a commute. The quality of the time, rather than the quantity, is important and that has been missing from many families. They have been missing quality time where people have the space and energy to have a proper family life.

We need to acknowledge, however, that there are consequences to remote working and all of us who are here in Leinster House today and have walked around the streets of our capital city can attest to how quiet Dublin is right now. The same is true for Galway, Limerick, Cork and many of our bigger towns. They have been hollowed out and are very quiet.That has implications for many people's jobs. Many of the coffee shops and other retail outlets, as well as bars and restaurants, are built around those people coming into city and town centres to work. We must deal with the fallout. We know it is happening but how will we protect all those businesses that will lose out from the reduced footfall, from people not being there in the morning to get their cup of coffee going to work, picking up lunch on a break from work or popping into some of the retail shops on that lunch hour? Many businesses are losing out because of this and many will not survive remote working. As a Government, we must do something quickly about this and prepare for what we can see coming down the tracks to protect those businesses and jobs while trying to realign how we use our city and town centres.

With regard to the required facilities, I have touched on broadband, which is clearly a massive deficit in many rural communities in delivering a proper remote working strategy. Remote working has also thrown up a plethora of challenges around duties of care by employers to employees and how to ensure that when an employee is working from home, he or she can still be working in a safe working environment with proper equipment. For example, employees must log off from work and not take that work from the workstation to the kitchen table and then into bed at night. It is really important that there is that cut-off. I know some companies are doing great work in this regard by ensuring employees have a set working space that is separate and distinct from where they live and have their family life. That will be a challenge for employers as not every employee has the space to do that. That should not preclude them from availing of the option to work from home.

There must be some out-of-the-box thinking from employers, and the biggest employer in the country is the public service and the State, so we must lead the way on this to ensure employees have the option to work from home. When they do so, they must be properly cared for and the duty of care owed by an employer to the employee should be properly maintained so we do not see any difficulties down the line. We can do this by planning ahead and anticipating the challenges we know are coming down the tracks, putting a plan in place and ensuring we can deal with them adequately.

We must also look at local amenities. If more people than ever are to work from their base at home and not travel to the towns or cities to which they would normally travel, they will require better local amenities in smaller rural towns and villages. We have come to have a new or greater appreciation for shared outdoor public spaces. There was much discussion in the Chamber today at various times about the national development plan, and many of us have said the deadline is this Friday for having a say or giving a view on how the plan should be shaped. It will effectively deal with every fabric of life, including the distribution of housing, education, public amenities, transport and communications, as well as all other aspects of life. It is important these national plans, which are for the long term, reflect the changes that have occurred at an accelerated pace in the past year. Part of that will concern the redesign and reconfiguration of our outdoor shared public spaces not just in the large urban centres but in villages and smaller towns. They have really been neglected because, until now, most people left their villages and travelled elsewhere to go to work. People still need to have the space to go outside with work colleagues at times, and for their well-being and health they should have an opportunity to exercise outside.

Remote working is here to stay but because of it we will see many challenges. We must ensure people have the facilities for it and the employer's duty of care is maintained. We must have the required resources, such as broadband. We must also deal with the incoming difficulties arising from the fact that people will no longer work to the same level in our city centres and think about how we can reconfigure city centres to still work for us.