Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 5:

In page 4, between lines 16 and 17, to insert the following:

“Report on extending parent’s leave and benefit 8. The Minister shall prepare and lay a report before the Houses of the Oireachtas on extending the full duration of parent’s leave and benefit by 4 weeks and that the report shall be presented to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Social Protection within 1 month of the passing of this Act.”

This amendment calls for a report on extending parent's leave and benefit. We are asking that the Minister would prepare and lay a report before the Houses of Oireachtas on extending the full duration of parent's leave and benefit by four weeks. That report should be presented to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Social Protection within one month of the passing of this Act. This is something we should all be able to agree on, namely a further progressive move relating to parental leave. The target of 13 weeks is something we should aspire to and achieve. As the Minister knows, this leave is currently nine weeks. Admittedly it has been improved in recent years and we acknowledge that. However, in our alternative budget, which was costed by the Department of Finance, we extended the leave to 13 weeks so that parents can spend more time with their child in the first two years of his or her life. That is something to which we would all aspire.

Amendment No. 6, as I mentioned in my Second Stage contribution, calls for a report on introducing a parental bereavement leave and benefit scheme. The reality at the moment is just cruel. If someone loses a child, he or she effectively has to be back at work after three days. At a time we have a surplus of €24 billion, surely to God we could do something on this. This is not something that Sinn Féin has just come up with in the past month. We have raised this in our three most recent alternative budgets. Effectively we are calling for a parental bereavement scheme to be introduced to give parents two week's pay so that in the awful situation where they have lost a child, they can actually get that payment for two weeks to give them some time during that horrific early mourning period. Frankly, it is something that should have been addressed years ago. I ask the Minister, at the very least, to allow this report to be prepared so that whoever is in government next can act on it.