Employment minister Regina Doherty (pictured) is adding to the panoply of legislation surrounding employee’s entitlement to time off work when a child is born. The Parental Leave (Amendment) Act 2019 provides for two weeks of ‘paid leave’ for each parent during the first year after the baby’s birth, and Doherty has signalled that the entitlement will expand to seven weeks by 2023.

The upshot is that from this autumn mothers will be entitled to 28 weeks of paid leave and 34 weeks of unpaid leave. Fathers will be entitled to four weeks of paid leave and 22 weeks of unpaid leave. These are the various programmes:

• Paid Maternity Leave: the mother’s entitlement is 26 weeks. Subject to PRSI conditions, there’s a state payment of €245 per week.
• Unpaid Maternity Leave: the mother’s entitlement is 16 weeks, which begins immediately after the end of paid maternity leave.
• Paid Paternity Leave: two weeks leave for the father within six months after child’s birth. State pays €245 per week.
• Unpaid Parental Leave:  From 1 September 2019, the new law will allow parents to take up to 22 working weeks of unpaid parental leave, an extra four weeks on top of the current entitlement. The age of a qualifying child increases from 8 years to 12 years.
• Paid Parental Leave: the new measure, providing for two weeks’ paid leave for each parent within 12 months of baby’s birth. State pays benefit of €245 per week.

With paid maternity, paternity and parental leave, there is no legal obligation on the employer to top up the state benefit to the level of the individual’s regular pay. In the public sector, it’s taken as a given that this is what happens. In the private sector, CIPD Ireland estimates that half of employers top up maternity benefit and one in three top up paternity benefit.

Significant Confusion

CIPD Ireland, which has 6,000 members in Ireland, says there is significant confusion among employees about the changes.

Director of CIPD Ireland, Mary Connaughton, stated: “Our members across Ireland have been telling us of significant confusion amongst their workforce about the changes. A concerted effort must be made to streamline the various changes, which while welcome individually, have become bureaucratically difficult to implement.

In Association with

“The combination of schemes and rules is somewhat confusing for both employers and employees. Overall these change means that parental leave will increase from the current 18 weeks unpaid leave to a total of 33 weeks paid and unpaid leave by 2021, a significant increase of an additional 15 weeks per parent per child.

“The complexity and differing rules that apply to the different entitlements is a worrying development and does not necessarily result in increased flexibility in how parents choose to manage their time off.”

Q&A with Caroline McEnery, MD of The HR Suite 

There is a lot of talk at the moment about the new changes to parental leave, how will the changes affect employees?
The Parental Leave (Amendment) Act 2019 came into effect on 19 July 2019.  The new legislation extends the number of weeks of parental leave that can be taken and also increases the age of a child for whom parental leave can be taken.

Entitlement
Up until 1^st September 2019 the parent has been entitled to take 18 weeks unpaid leave to allow them to take care of a child up to the age of 8 years old.  However, on 19 July 2019 The Parental Leave (Amendment) Act 2019 came in to effect. The provisions set out in this Act are as follows:

• From the 1^st of September 2019 the entitlement will increase to 22 weeks unpaid parental leave.
• From the 1^st of September 2020 the entitlement will increase to 26 weeks unpaid parental leave.

Age Limit
The age of the child for which parental leave is available has risen from 8 years old to 12 years old.

 What about parents who have already taken their parental leave?
The Act allows any parent who did not use their full entitlement under the previous act to claim any unused leave as long as their child is under 12 years of age.

How much notice must the parent give the employer?
Parents are required to provide their employers with 6 weeks’ notice of their intention to take parental leave.

I heard there may be new legislation regarding paid parental leave.  Do you have any information on this?
A new paid Parental Leave Scheme that allows parents to take two weeks paid leave each during their child’s first year is expected from November 2019. Legislation needs to be enacted before this change can come into effect.

Service Requirement
An employee must have at least one year’s continuous service with the employer before being entitled to take parental leave.

Leave
Leave may be taken either as:

• block of 18 weeks
• two separate periods of a minimum of six weeks each. There must be a gap of at least 10 weeks between the two periods of parental leave per child.
• if the employer agrees the employee can separate the leave into periods of days or even hours.

Pay / Annual Leave / Public Holidays
There is no entitlement to payment or social welfare payments during parental leave from the employer. Employees on parental leave accrue annual leave and public holiday entitlement as if they were working as normal. Accrued entitlements can be taken at the end of the parental leave period.

• For advice on HR related issues for employers contact The HR Suite on 066 710 2887.