Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Section 8 inserts a new Part IIA into the Parental Leave Act to provide for a right to request a flexible working arrangement for caring purposes. The provisions of the new Part IIA go towards the transposition of Article 9 of the work-life balance directive. Part IIA has been carefully drafted to ensure that the directive is correctly transposed and provides the right to parents and those providing personal care or support for serious medical reasons to be a person who falls within the range of family or personal relationships set out in the directive.

A definition of "flexible working arrangements", which was Senator Currie's point, is set out within the definitions section of the Bill. It reads: "'flexible working arrangement' means a working arrangement where an employee's working hours or patterns are adjusted, including through the use of remote working arrangements, flexible working schedules or reduced working hours". These are the three elements that I have always thought of – remote working, flexible schedules and a reduction in hours. This definition is reasonably clear as regards what constitutes flexible working and is stated in section 3, which amends the principal Act. It will be repeated in the code of practice to be delivered by the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, in terms of how the legislation will be implemented.

Senator Currie's amendments seek to broaden the right. The review period of two years that is set out in section 13H allows us to consider broadening the entitlement.

Regarding the narrower application of flexible working to remote working, this legislation is the result of two Bills, those being, the right to request remote working Bill, which the now Taoiseach was developing while he was Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and the existing work-life balance Bill. When we considered bringing the two together, we discussed the application of remote working to all workers as opposed to the application of flexible working to parents and carers. I wanted to enunciate that, in the review period, we would examine whether flexible working should be extended more broadly. Reading the text around the review, that intention could be more explicit. There is a direction of travel that I would like to see us go in terms of making this provision broader.

While I am not in a position to accept the amendments, I will look to make the review under section 13H more explicit to ensure that we are enunciating that extending flexible working to groups beyond just parents and carers would be considered.