Employment Rights
Dail Éireann — 2022-02-10
============================================================

Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West

As a serious policy point, I get the dilemma and I hear what the Deputy is saying. I really think the solution is not in paying sick pay to people who do not have to produce any evidence that they are sick. The solution is in improving access to GP care and healthcare, and raising the eligibility limits. It is not 40% of workers but 40% of people who receive free GP care in Ireland. We can improve that and we can raise the eligibility limits or, alternatively, we can use the treatment benefits system to perhaps recoup some of the costs of attending a GP in the way that is done for a dentist, for example, or an optician.

---

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/2022-02-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:50:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-02-10