Flexible Work and Commuter Delays: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Ged Nash (LAB), Louth

The Labour Party deliberately decided to align transport issues with the Government's chronic track record on providing a right to working people to access remote work. We get an insight today into this Government's thinking on remote work, for two reasons. The first is that the Government's response to our motion is effectively silent on the question of remote work. The second is that Ministers and their Secretaries General are actively working to ensure public and civil servants who worked, in some instances, one day a week at their desk in Dublin are now being instructed - forced - back to those desks on 1 February. They are being forced also onto crowded and congested trains in areas like Drogheda and forced onto roads that were tolled by Fianna Fáil back in the 2000s, adding insult to injury.
I will give some examples from my recent experience on the M1. On 18 December, a very minor tip on the motorway meant thousands of other commuters and I were sitting in traffic outside Drogheda for two and a half hours. The very next day, there was a very serious incident and a woman lost her life. That is the important thing we must remember. That was outside Drogheda on the M1 on 19 December and it caused traffic to be delayed by five and a half hours. The important thing is the emergency services could get to the people who were affected but TII, which is the organisation responsible for providing information on these issues when they arise, was practically silent. There were no updates on social media and belated instructions to drivers on dynamic signage to divert away from the area, and that is simply not good enough.
The right to request remote work as it stands is an empty formula due to the legislation. It is a meaningless melange of words that makes no difference whatsoever to working people. I have a right to request that Drogheda United win the Champion's League but we know that is not going to happen. That is the reality of this kind of situation. The Government is making empty gestures to working people and giving them the impression they have a right that does not exist at all in law. That needs to change. I met a civil servant who has been instructed back to her desk in Dublin who is working productively from home as it stands. I met her on Monday and she asked why, with our antiquated, underfunded transport infrastructure under such well-documented strain, the Government would send civil servants like her and her colleagues, who have proven they can successfully work from home, into the chaos of a transport system that was already so dysfunctional.
The Minister of State will know that Drogheda is one of the fastest-growing areas of the country. We are building 5,000 homes on the north side of the town, 2,000 of which have already been built. To take the strain off the train station in Drogheda, we need to be building a second station. If we were building a second train station, I would accept this Government was serious about providing the supports and infrastructure to commuters to allow them to get to Dublin for work but that project is nobody's child. Irish Rail is saying, in effect, that developers should build it. There are areas with smaller populations where train stations are being built and the demand is clear in the Drogheda area yet it simply is not happening. As the Minister of State knows, Drogheda's station is chock-a-block every morning before 7 a.m. and you will get clamped if you happen to encroach on, for example, yellow box junctions when you have a ticket and need to get onto the train. All these issues need to be addressed and the easiest and quickest way to address this would be to give workers a right to work remotely.

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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