Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State and everybody for their comments and contributions. There is so much work to do with this and it is important that we recognise the challenges because only by recognising the challenges can we come up with solutions. That is what I ultimately want to do and the people who are invested in this want to do that as well. We have had so many naysayers about remote work for years and then Covid happened and it showed things could be done differently. So, when people tell me again that something cannot be done because of X, Y or Z, I will push back and say it can because of this experience. The strategy is aspirational in parts but behind the aspirations there are ideas to make this work. If it can change the way we work and live, that is a good thing.

We are living in an extreme at the moment. We are all working from home and it is ironic that by limiting our choice and restricting our movements, that is the time where we are showing that remote work can work as a choice. Remote work is all about choice, even with the irony that it had to be under conditions in which we did not have a choice.That will change. The real challenges are coming now. We have seen what can happen when going from one extreme to the next. The question is how we are going to cope. We are talking about a blend, but a blend is what is just naturally going to happen and we have to be set up for that.

I do not buy into this idea that remote means the death of the office. I do not buy into the idea that it is the death of physical meetings or the death of cities. It is not. It is coming together with a purpose. If we are working remotely more, we come together with more of a purpose. There will be plenty of offices where people congregate and nobody is suggesting that is not going to happen. It is about choice and maintaining equal opportunities around those choices.

It is very important to stay connected to the companies that are doing this well, like Dropbox, which is giving up its fancy HQ office to go for bubble offices around the country, where people can meet for team meetings or for co-working, and where people get to work side to side. While there are problems in regard to socialisation and peer-to-peer training, there are ways around that.

In regard to the point that the strategy takes a hands-off approach to health and safety, the Department came out with advice very quickly and ran a public consultation that became a bigger conversation, and it now has more guidance on health and safety. It is very difficult for people whose homes are just not set up for this, and the question of the right to disconnect has really shown how important this is. We need to look at the legislation that is there and that people do not know about, given there seems to be quite a bit that the public does not know about. We can then see what needs to be done to fix the gaps, wherever they are.

A booklet around home working is very important. We have done this for other sectors and we need it for people who are working from home going forward. That work is not going to be wasted. There needs to be clear guidance because there are places where employers come to me and say they are not sure about this and say that the guidance is not as clear as it should be.

In regard to tax, we have to be careful about the transition for employers given that only 5% of employers are paying employer tax relief, and we need them to invest in remote first.

To sum up my main points, we need to focus on remote first for equal opportunities and we need a communications campaign around that. I want to leave the House with that idea. I accept what speakers say about the gig economy, but this should not be about that. It is not the casualisation of work and it should be about pensionable jobs. The quality of the hubs is going to be very important. That is why I came with ideas about how we can do that and how we can ensure that, instead of communities doing this by themselves, we are offering a standard quality whereby, if someone has a phone call, he or she can go somewhere private and we do not have those issues. We have to create supply. Employers have to be able to advertise jobs that are remote. We need to be able to create the pathways to employment and then, locally, we need to create remote-ready communities where the demand is.