Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is good to see Senator McGreehan in the Chair. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy English. Like others, I pay tribute to Senator Currie, who is passionate about this issue. This is a timely and appropriate debate as the Government contemplates issues around remote working. I would like to comment on a couple of the contributions.Senator McDowell is right to state that we need to encourage the decentralisation of the public service. When he was Minister for Justice, one of the things that he committed to was decentralising the office of the gambling regulator. This year we will finally see legislation on gambling regulation. I am quite confident that my Wexford colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Browne, will deliver on that, 14 years later.

Senator Higgins was right in respect of the question around progression opportunities. It is most important for those in the public and private sectors, that if they choose to engage in remote working, they are in no way denied progression opportunities. Measures must be put in place to ensure that. Senators Higgins and Sherlock raised the question of the right to disconnect and the importance of putting that on a legislative basis. I am not quite sure how the right to disconnect could be enforced for Members of the Oireachtas, or indeed for local councillors, or how it could be explained to constituents. It is a challenge for us Members as we are so often in contact with constituents. However, as has been said, remote working has been transformed and has the potential to transform not just rural but many urban communities. I have seen it in my home town of Gorey where, in a partnership that was developed between Redmond Construction and Wexford County Council, the M11 business park was developed. It had a number of anchored tenants. The Hatch Lab was also developed which accommodated a small number of companies as well as hot-desking. There was, therefore, a local ecosystem which allowed the escape referred to by Senators Currie and Garvey, but equally allowed for the exchange of ideas, which is most important within communities.

In light of the welcome remote working strategy, a review of the outdated national planning framework is necessary. Given some of the overreach of the Office of the Planning Regulator in respect of our city and county development plans, the fact that we are all now working in a new and different way must be taken into consideration. This has been shown by the pandemic. The pandemic has also shown the importance of some of our values as a society around health, family and community, and how remote working can reinforce them.

I will make a few general comments on the change in the use of technology, which will be wonderful. However, I am concerned that we, as a society, and I include the Government more generally in this, are not sufficiently prepared for the pace of technological change and how that will impact not just on society but on the workplace over the years ahead. We will see a far greater degree of automation over the next decade in all areas. In fact, there are very few professions or occupations that will not be impacted by automation. We must put in place strategies to deal with that. That includes significant levels of upskilling and retraining. In my view, if the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science is purely an administrative Department, it will have failed. Its role must be to identify the technological change that we will see and to prepare all citizens to be ready for that change.

In the future, we will not see remote working or learning, where people are simply at home the whole time and locked away. We will see a blend. We still all need human company. Dare I say it, but I am missing physical meetings. One cannot read a room on Zoom. There is great benefit in being able to walk around a workplace and pick up knowledge and interact with people. There will be a blend. How that will be regulated will be important.

I welcome this motion. It starts an important debate that we must have about the nature of the workplace and the challenges we will face as a result of technology that is coming down the line.I hope that, in the Minister of State's response and in the Government's implementation of this remote working strategy, we look at levels of serious investment in reskilling and upskilling and, as Senator Higgins, said, addressing the digital divide.