Flexible Work and Commuter Delays: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

The Government is barely a year in office and is already on track to be one of the worst Governments on record when it comes to public transport. It depends on right-wing rural TDs who could not care less about commuters in Dublin or elsewhere. All they want is more money for roads in their constituencies. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Ministers are perfectly happy with that, relaxing in their chauffeur-driven Mercs and claiming thousands of euro in travel expenses while ordinary workers are stuck behind the wheels of their cars and on buses and trains for hours every day and forced to pay the full cost of fuel, motorway tolls, bus fares and wasted time out of their own pocket.
About the only good thing to come out of Covid was the normalisation of working from home. All of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of workers who could do their jobs just as well at home got parts of their lives back. There were high hopes that the Government's law on remote working would back them up and protect that precious work-life balance. Leo Varadkar even claimed that businesses would need a very good reason not to allow staff to work from home. What happened was that the Government danced to the tune of big business, as usual. It betrayed workers and brought in what is a meaningless right to request remote working. It is not worth the paper it is written on. Over the past year we have seen lobbying from the Dublin Chamber of Commerce to ensure that no real rights are given to workers.
The same thing is happening with the public consultation on the law that started last year. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, is not expecting any significant change even though submissions from frustrated workers outnumbered those from employers by more than ten to one. The level of corporate capture we have seen here is not an isolated case. The campaigning organisation Uplift launched an important report yesterday that lays out in damning detail the scale of corporate power in this State. Across social media, health and housing, big business is setting the agenda and dominating every aspect of our lives. We can hear it in the car radio as we sit in traffic, forced to drive because of that corporate capture and the long-fingering of projects like DART+ South West and Luas Finglas and the absence of new funding for public transport services this year. The anti-working-from-home trend is going to make things worse. Every fat cat billionaire from Denis O'Brien to Jeff Bezos is pontificating against working from home while they sit on their yachts. We need to give people the right to work from home, and we need to invest in free frequent public transport.

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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