The Parental Leave Bill was the latest measure in a raft of European social legislation which cumulatively posed a major threat to our ability to sustain jobs, Mr Feargal Quinn (Ind) warned. Taken as a whole, this legislative package had greatly increased the cost of employing people in Europe, said the supermarket chain chief executive.
Europe officially acknowledged that labour market rigidity was a serious problem and that social legislation was a primary cause of that rigidity. Praising the Government for not framing the legislation in the most extreme terms permitted by the European directive, Mr Quinn said he had been appalled at the barrage of criticism which had greeted the Bill from some quarters earlier this week. "This was not criticism about having the Bill at all, which is where I am coming from, but criticism that it does not go far enough." Those who demanded that parental leave be paid were totally out of touch with the real world in which businesses had to operate.
Mr Quinn urged the Minister for Equality, Mr O'Donoghue, to re-examine what he termed the disastrous proposal to provide paid force majeure leave for employees to cope with family crises.
Introducing the Bill, which passed the second stage, the Minister said it represented a significant element of the equality agenda to which his Department was fully committed. It provided an opportunity to reconcile work and family life and to share childcare responsibilities between men and women.
In the two decades up to 1996 the number of women in the workplace had grown from 212,000 to 488,000. Reacting to calls from outside the House for the leave to be paid, the Minister said that to require employers to provide pay for someone who was absent on parental leave for 14 weeks, in addition to the cost of having a replacement, would not only be costly for individual employers but would be fundamentally damaging to Ireland's competitive position. Were the Exchequer to fund it through social welfare benefits, the annual cost would amount to an estimated £40 million and he did not think this level of expenditure was warranted.
A special debate on the controversy surrounding the office of the insurance ombudsman has been tentatively arranged for next week, following demands by Independent and Fine Gael members.