Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Senator Clifford-Lee's remarks were well made. Ireland should be a leader in the area of remote working. We can be competitive and be compassionate about our workers at the same time. A working group was launched yesterday called the Remote Alliance. It consists of four leading Irish employers: eBay and Liberty Insurance, companies that I am pleased to say are located in Dublin 15, and the ESB and Vodafone. Those businesses have come together to drive the cultural change required to embrace remote working permanently. People might ask why this is needed now when we seem to have been talking non-stop about remote working over the past year. In that time, we have gone from a situation where everyone was predominantly office-based to one where everybody has been working from home. Now we need to do the hard part, which involves embracing a mixture of both working environments and achieving a balance. Some people will want the best of both worlds and that will mean that some people will be managing teams with different preferences. Therefore, managerial and organisational change will be required. We must also ensure that people working remotely will have the same career opportunities as they would have had if they were working in the office.

The organisation, Grow Remote, is leading the initiative in this regard.It is going to consist of a toolbox, which the group is calling a sandbox, that other employers can then use in their cultural change.

It reminds me that the budget is coming up and we have promised to review the treatment of tax. At present, employers can pay their employees €3.20 per day without deducting tax. At €830 per year, that is a significant amount in anybody's wages. Companies that have been thriving and saving their money should be passing that on to their employees and not all of them have. Employees are then opting for the personal tax relief, which is much less. The question is how we make that more equitable and how do we ensure we are supporting hubs. If somebody is getting €820 a year to work from home, can we also support them in the same way to work from a hub? Working from a village is just as valuable, if not more so, than working from home.