Responsibility for employment rights issues such as entitlement to sick leave lies primarily with my colleague the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and I understand that the Deputy has put down a question to him in this regard already. As far as my Department is concerned, employees who are insured may be entitled to the social insurance based income support payment disability benefit, DB. This payment is made by the Department to persons who are unable to work due to illness and who satisfy the contribution conditions. Disability benefit is not normally paid for the first three days of illness, known as waiting days, but is payable for up to 52 weeks if the insured person has between 52 and 259 paid contributions and up until the age of 66 if a person has a total of 260 weeks or more paid contributions since entering employment. Disability benefit is currently paid at €134.8 per week with additional payments for dependants.
Some Irish employees also have access to occupational sick pay schemes administered by their employers which may or may not be integrated with the DB payment. This is a matter between employers and employees whether individually or as part of collective agreements. A number of countries operate a system known as statutory sick pay, SSP, which involves transferring the responsibility for administering sick pay for employees to their employers. Under a statutory sick pay scheme, an employer would be obliged by law to provide a certain minimum standard of pay in the event of illness for a certain minimum period. As part of the Government programme of reviewing expenditure programmes, my Department published a review of illness and disability payment schemes. The working group which carried out the review considered that an examination of the possible introduction of SSP would have merit from an efficiency and effectiveness viewpoint.
As a first step, it was considered that current sick pay arrangements by employers should be examined in detail and the potential for change assessed. There are no immediate plans to carry out such an examination but the issue will be kept under review by my Department.