Flexible Work and Commuter Delays: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Thomas Gould (SF), Cork North-Central

I thank the Labour Party for bringing forward this motion. A lot of the time, we come in here and talk about issues that might be abstract or wonder if they really make a difference to people's lives. This actually makes a difference to the lives of workers, families, communities and employers. This provides a solution and a pathway to making a real difference.
In Cork at the moment - the Minister of State will know as he is a Corkman, like myself - the gridlock is unbelievable. People are forced to travel to work when there should be flexibility. People should be able to work from home. Employers should be able to work with workers to come up with solutions. Since Covid, we have seen the drive to get more and more people back to working nine to five. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting it to change. At the moment, we have people driven onto roads that are gridlocked to get to jobs when a lot of them could work from home.
A happier worker is a more productive worker and a better employee. It is good for the worker, the family and the employer; it makes sense. Talking about Cork for a minute, we have total gridlock there, and the Minister of State knows this himself, coming from an area that is one of the worst parts of it. Cork is the 38th most congested city in the world, worse than London. How can Cork be more congested than London? However, those are the facts.
We then have a huge number of people being forced to drive every day and we have a public transport system that is on its knees and does not work. I will give an example. To finish on this, a freedom of information request I made stated that one in three buses in Cork is late and in some cases one in two buses does not turn up. That is not good enough. It is wrong.

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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