Flexible Work and Commuter Delays: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Emer Currie (FG), Dublin West

I will not spend two and a half minutes talking about the benefits of remote and flexible working because I spent five years talking about those benefits, as my colleague Deputy Wall knows. Instead, in the two and a half minutes I have, I will focus on the first line of the motion, which states that "employees in Ireland have no right to flexible and remote work, only a right to request it from their employer". Have my Labour Party colleagues found a country that gives people such a right? The only one I have found over the years is Finland and, even there, it is only for office workers. We must be careful not to give the impression that legislation will fix all of this, which is not accurate. A bigger approach is needed when making cultural changes in society and in workplaces.
That is what we did with the remote work strategy that was introduced by the previous Government. It invested in 400 co-working spaces around the country, in the national broadband plan, in training companies on the cultural change and in offering training to employees through Grow Remote, in which I am involved. That is why our statistics around remote working are so strong. We are higher up the table than most countries in Europe in terms of the number of people working fully remotely and the numbers working from home. Is the system perfect? No, it is not, which is why it is time to devise a new strategy on remote and flexible working to protect what we have and improve it.
Ireland should be the best country in the world for remote working. That must be our ambition. We should have a strategy that targets global companies that work remotely and digitally first and attracts them to Ireland. That would have a halo effect on other companies in Ireland because it would show the productivity and success levels of those companies with a remote-first approach. Can the legislation be improved? It absolutely can and should be improved. There is a spectrum when it comes to the right to request remote working and we are on the wrong side of that spectrum in terms of the legislation having teeth. There are ways in which we can make it a lot stronger such that it boils down to allowing only genuine business reasons for companies to have an issue with remote work. We certainly should strengthen the legislation.
There was a missed opportunity in the introduction of flexible work for carers of children only up to the age of 12. The real cultural and social change will come when there is a degendering of that provision and it is not just, as it usually is, the mother accessing flexible work. It should be available to everybody.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-31T01:00:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-21