Legislative Reviews
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-28
============================================================

Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown

Essentially, what I am hearing is that the Government responded, it built a solution that is working and that there is nothing to see here. I am saying it is not working. I looked at the report by the Department. Although its conclusion states everything is working, which is what we heard again today numerous times, a few pages earlier it talks about the toothless tiger critique and states: "The qualitative findings clarify that this is not a vague or general complaint, but a specific and targeted critique of the perceived power imbalance within the current framework." That is my issue. It is laid upon a situation where we do not have collective bargaining so people are not coming forward to exercise their right to request remote working. They have no power to push back against multinational corporations, which at a whim can decide they want people to work two, three, four or five days in the office. That is the issue. Workers have no strength and the legislation does not help that in any way whatsoever.
We could be leaders in this. That is what kills me most. The Government tries to tell us we are leaders in the technology space. We could be leaders in this, by tapping into this technology and setting the trend for what we should be doing in facilitating remote working to deal with crises right now.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:52+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-28