Winter is coming and so are the coughs, colds and caring emergencies. As HR professionals know all too well, this is the season when requests for time off multiply: “My child’s sick again”, “Mum’s had a fall”, “I need time for a doctor’s appointment”.

But which type of leave actually applies? Force majeure? Compassionate? Parental? Carer’s? It can feel like an alphabet soup of entitlements and one wrong move can leave an employer exposed.

Join Aoife Gallagher-Watson, Director, Employment Law, EY Law Ireland, Caroline Kelly, Personal and Executive Coach, TalentPro, and Laura McKee, Knowledge Partner, Legal Island for a lively, plain-speaking session that cuts through the confusion. Together they’ll help you:

1. Decode the differences between force majeure, compassionate and carer’s leave

2. Clarify employee rights on parental, parent’s, maternity, paternity and antenatal leave

3. Handle those tricky “life happens” conversations with confidence and fairness

Expect practical examples, expert insights, and a few light-bulb moments along the way.

It’s 45 minutes that could save you hours of head-scratching this winter. 

Transcript to Follow:

Laura: Good morning, everyone. You are very welcome to today's Legal-Island webinar on "Making Sense of Family Leave in the Irish Workplace". My name is Laura McKee, and I am part of the Knowledge Team here at Legal-Island. And today I'm delighted to introduce our speakers. We have Aoife Gallagher-Watson. She's a Director of Employment Law at EY Law, and Caroline Kelly, human resources and coaching professional.

Morning, Aoife and Caroline. Thank you so much for being here.

Caroline: Hi, Laura. Thank you.

Laura: So what are we talking about today? Well, in this session, Aoife and Caroline will be tackling one of the trickiest topics for HR teams: family leave in the workplace.

As we all know, winter is on the way, and on some mornings, it feels like it's already here. And with that comes the usual coughs, colds, and some caring emergencies. So it's the time of year when calls start rolling into HR teams such as, "My child is sick again", or, "I need time off for a doctor's appointment".

And here's the real challenge. What type of leave actually applies here? Is it force majeure? Is it compassionate carers’ leave? Parental leave? Today, we're here to help you make sense of the alphabet soup of entitlements and hopefully give you some much-needed clarity for the months ahead.

You will receive a recording of the webinar, and we do have some slides, and they will be shared with you in an email after the webinar.

If you have any questions today, please do drop them into the Q&A box.

So now I'd like to tell you a little about Aoife Gallagher-Watson. She is a director in employment law at EY Law. She has over 15 years' experience in Ireland and overseas, specialising in employment law and workplace health and safety law. Aoife advises clients across a wide range of industries on both contentious and non-contentious matters, including regulatory investigations and prosecutions. She also regularly contributes articles to Legal-Island's Employment Law Hub.

We're also delighted to be joined today by Caroline Kelly. So Caroline is an experienced HR and coaching professional with over 20 years' experience across industries, including telecoms, medtech, and fintech. She's a qualified personal and management coach and specialises in organisational development, change management, and leadership training. So she's delighted to share her practical HR experience in managing family leave in today's session.

And thanks, as always, to our sponsors, MCS Group. MCS help people find careers that match their skill sets perfectly, as well as supporting employees to build high-performing businesses by connecting them with the most talented candidates in the market. If you're interested in finding out how MCS can help you, head to mcsgroup.jobs.

Before we begin our webinar, we will do some quick polls. It's all anonymous, so please don't worry. You will see on your screen shortly a poll, and it'll be great to see some of the results.

What's your biggest HR priority for 2026? Is it talent attraction and retention; legal compliance and pay transparency; managing absence; AI adoption and innovation; or is it D&I? So just give it a minute to see some results coming in there.

So, talent attraction and retention seems to be a big one, followed by managing absence and AI adoption and innovation. Great. Thank you so much for sharing those.

We do have another poll, and it's all about AI. We'd love to know "How is your organisation is currently approaching AI tools, for example, ChatGPT or Copilot, in relation to your HR or L&D training needs?" Are you reducing your reliance on external training using AI tools? Is AI being used informally but hasn't replaced formal training? Are you exploring AI? Are you restricting or prohibiting the use? Are you unsure at the moment?

A big majority seems to be just exploring AI but haven't fully integrated into HR yet at 64%. Fantastic. Thank you so much. That's really useful data for us.

We're now going to start straight into our webinar. So I'd like to hand you over to Aoife and Caroline. Thank you so much for being here. I'm looking forward to discussing family leave with you.

Caroline: Thanks, Laura.

Aoife: Thanks for having us. I'm just going to see if I can share these slides. My share button has just stopped working, actually. It's just frozen, so I can just . . . Hang on. Here we go. Tell me if you can see that.

Laura: Brilliant. We can see that.

Aoife: We got it. Great. Perfect. Thanks a million for having me. And as you know, I think this is a really interesting topic. I think it's interesting because we're very fortunate that we live in a country where we have lots of different leave options available to us now. And I suppose the flip side of that is it can make it quite confusing sometimes.

It's interesting as well because it applies to all of us on the day-to-day. It can happen to anyone at any given point in time or any stage of your life. So there's a lot in it, as I said.

What we'll do is we'll dive into it, given the context of today's session, I suppose, where we're talking about winter coughs and colds and what we're all heading into over the next few months. I'm going to talk very quickly about the family leave that we have in Ireland in general, but I'll focus then on what's likely to kind of come up and arise for us now over the next few months.

So obviously, we've got great leave there for maternity, paternity, adoptive, kind of extended parental-type leaves there. Probably not really relevant in the context of dealing with an unexpected cough, cold, flu, or trip or fall, or whatever it might be.

I mean, personally speaking, I know when I was on maternity leave with my second and third, the only great thing was that if one of the other guys got sick, I was off and I could deal with that. So that was fantastic.

But in the short term, they're not really going to be relevant, are they? It's going to be more like your force majeure, your medical care leave, your sick leave, your self-carer's leave perhaps if we're dealing with a longer-term situation.

I've also included "other" there, and by that, I suppose I mean nowadays with remote working and things like that, there are flexible working options that some companies might allow. Other companies will kind of approach things in their own way and maybe allow for some unpaid leave.

I know it's not uncommon for employers to get requests for, "Look, I just can't afford to take an unpaid day or a medical care leave day. Can I take an annual leave day?" And that in itself presents its own problems, and we'll get into that a little bit later in the session.

So then just diving into the types of leaves that I think are most likely to come up for people attending today over the next few months, I obviously mentioned force majeure leave. This is quite a specific one. I think it's often misunderstood by employees in that it's really only for that very urgent care type situation where your presence is essential or indispensable.

Since becoming a parent myself, I sometimes think it's a little bit unfair because what might feel urgent to a parent, or to a new parent in particular, isn't necessarily what's captured by the law. But we do have medical care leave now, which kind of, I think, balances that out a little bit.

Just to finish on the force majeure there, it's obviously for relatives, parents, spouses, children, grandparents. There's a good range there. And you can take 3 days in any 12-month period, and then 5 days in a 36-month period. So that's another thing that people tend to trip up on.

The medical care leave, then, I think, is a little bit more flexible, and the categories that it applies to are a little bit wider. It also includes a person residing in the same household as you, for example.

But the downside to the medical care leave is that it is unpaid. So it doesn't always work for everyone, I suppose, but I think it's a really nice backup and support for people to have that there, especially if you do have young people in the house because there's always the unexpected, the horrendous or the dreaded vomiting bug that we all fear, or the coughs, the colds, the flus. So it does give you a little bit of wiggle room and that statutory entitlement to some understanding from your employer if it's needed.

Laura: Sorry, Aoife. Just before you continue, would you mind just putting your slides into the slideshow mode so that we can see the next one? We're stuck on the first one.

Aoife: Oh, right. It's showing on my side as . . . Let me see. It's showing on my side as Slide 4.

Laura: If you go down to the right-hand, you might be able to click . . . Let me see.

Aoife: Is that moving for you? It's moving on my end, and it's in slideshow mode.

Laura: Okay. No, it must be frozen. Don't worry. We'll see if we can fix it on our end. But no, it's not moving for us at the moment. Don't worry. Continue. We'll see if we can . . .

Aoife: I can turn it off for now, and I can keep speaking. That might be better. Can you see it there in smaller? What I'll do is I'll keep speaking to it and I think maybe we could circulate them afterwards then, Laura.

Laura: Yeah, perfect.

Aoife: Because sometimes for me personally, when it comes to the different types of family leave, and if there's anyone on this today who's ever worked with me, you'll know I love a good table. And having things laid out like this, I think, sometimes helps to decipher them. So that was kind of why I laid it out like this. So we can definitely recirculate.

And just to switch back to when I began, if you can see, I know it's quite small on the screen there, I kind of have just a short summary of the different types of leave that do apply. And then I just drill down into the detail then of the ones that are more likely to come up over Christmas here. Sorry, I didn't realise you couldn't see that.

So I started with force majeure in the first column and medical care leave in the second column. And then I was going to talk about compassionate leave, which isn't a statutory entitlement as such. This is kind of something that's dealt with company by company. And depending on what your own culture and your own approach is, some companies will allow compassionate leave only in the event of a bereavement. Others will allow compassionate leave on grounds where there's been a very serious injury or illness with a family member.

As I said, there's no kind of hard and fast on what's allowed there. Typically, companies tend to allow three to five days, and they do tend to extend it to close family members, not just spouses and siblings, parents, close friends, aunts and uncles, that kind of thing.

The next one that I had in my column there that I thought might be relevant over the next few months is carers leave. Like the broader family leave category, this one is a little bit . . . it's exceptional. It's usually done on a long-term basis. It's a big commitment from both the employee and the employer, so probably not something you're going to be using for your coughs and your cold. That's more if you've got a family member who has a long-term illness maybe, or they've been through surgery and they're on a rehabilitation process, and you know you're going to need that long-term commitment.

Personally, for me, it's not something that seems to come up in practice a lot. We don't get a lot of queries on carers leave. I don't think it's used that often because of that unpaid element and because of that long-term commitment.

But look, it does allow for employees who have 12 months' service behind them to take up to the 104 weeks to care for a relevant person. And there are all sorts of little nuances that go with that in terms of they can work a certain amount of hours during that time. They are entitled to things like public holidays, annual leave for a period of up to 13 weeks. When it does come up, there are usually some unusual questions around carers leave because it is just that little bit different and not used that often.

And then the last category that I've included here is sick leave. I suppose that's when we're kind of facing our own coughs and colds and illnesses, not when we're dealing with something for an elderly relative or a young child.

We now have, obviously, a statutory entitlement of up to five days' sick leave in Ireland that gets paid up to 70% of salary, or a maximum of €110 per day. Employees do need 13 weeks of service behind them before that entitlement kicks in, and a medical cert is obviously required to qualify for that as well.

What we do find in practice, though, is that most employers tend to kind of go above and beyond that. Not all employers. It depends on what industry you're in, obviously, and what your industry norms are. But employers obviously can and regularly do go above and beyond that in what they tend to put provide.

So my personal view when I'm looking at this and when I'm talking about it, and I know when Caroline and I spoke about this, is that that all sounds great when you look at it in black and white. It seems really nice and neat and straightforward. But in practice, what the law expects and what the law anticipates isn't how life kind of unfolds.

And I don't know about you, Caroline. You've obviously been at the forefront of this dealing with the queries from managers and from employees directly themselves, I'm sure, as well. Do you find in practice that it all kind of fits neatly into these boxes that the statute and the law has provided for? The queries I tend to get seem to normally be a little bit outside, left of centre.

Caroline:No, completely agree with you, Aoife. There's no right answer, I think, when it comes to the application. You have policy versus legislation. It's how it's written in your policies is important.

And look, it's always important to be consistent as HR professionals in how we apply our policies in practice. But you have somebody sitting in front of you as a human being requiring a certain type of leave, to support them and to help them, and that may not necessarily fit into exactly what you have scripted in your policy or what the law allows for.

I think when you're on the ground with your team members, HR practitioners are constantly trying to balance, I suppose, the need for employee engagement and looking after your team member, but also with wanting to remain compliant with policies.

And there's a fear factor in that, right? HR professionals are constantly trying to balance the "I don't want to create a precedent here and give something to somebody that maybe I mightn't give in another situation", but then "How can I help my team member out to make sure they are supported and they feel the company looks after them in terms of what their needs are?"

Some examples you mentioned, that you alluded to there, was looking for any relief days on short notice if a team member needed to take time off for a sick family member, for example. But then, as you said, that's not rest and recuperation for the person availing of the annual leave, which is what the spirit of annual leave is for. So there's a bit of flexibility there.

Aoife: Yeah, you're having a hard [inaudible 00:14:50] time.

Caroline: Yeah, exactly. You don't want to disadvantage your team member, but you also need to be mindful that they could avail of that annual leave at a later date when they have the chance to enjoy it properly. So then you're looking to your policies and your available leave types, and you're exploring the options within that cohort to see what best suits the team member and stays within the guidelines of your policies.

I suppose the other issue I was just going to touch on there is that sometimes I feel HR can be a bit like a mediator between the business and team members, and sometimes we're caught in the middle between what we can do and what we can't do.

There is sometimes a perception that HR are on the side of the business, but it's actually a balancing act between, I suppose, what we can do and what we can't do.

I think if your policies are sound and you're managing your costs and your budgets in line with what you should be managing them, I think there is a bit of wiggle room and a bit of flexibility within your policies.

Aoife: Yeah, I think that rock and hard place really does apply to HR in these situations, doesn't it? Because there's this perception that the business is expecting you to look after the business and its needs and its priorities, and the employees think that you're on their side and you're there to help them. And really, as you said, you're trying to strike a balance.

And I think it drives home two things, really, what I'm hearing from you. It's the importance of our policies and our procedures, and then the importance of our culture and how it's all reflected kind of in reality.

So the policies, I think, are very important. A well-drafted policy can help deal with these types of situations in real life. They can be a huge help. I mean, the managers that are dealing with these queries on a day-to-day basis, before they come to you, the policy is going to be their first port of call, isn't it? And that could also kind of stop a lot of the queries that end up coming your way. If you've got a well-drafted and clear policy to provide a good roadmap or guideline for them, that's going to take a bit of work away from you.

I think we can also use our policies then to kind of explain the expectations or communicate expectations to employees. We can set out how, "Look, sometimes there's going to be a need to depart from this policy on a case-by-case basis", and we can come back to that later. We can talk about in our policy how granting leave in one instance doesn't mean or guarantee that it's going to be granted in a second situation.

We can really call out that not every situation is going to be the same. And you can just kind of pepper that language throughout your policy to manage and guide expectations in that sense.

I think then that kind of flips onto the culture point, because it's all well and good having a really well-drafted policy that lots of time and effort went into, but if it's not being reflected on the ground or rolled out in practice by managers, or you've got Manager A over here and Manager B over here and one is applying it completely different to the other, that can be different. It takes away from the good and the hard work that went into drafting your policy in the first place.

So how do you deal with that in practice in terms of your managers? Do you just give them the policy, and do you just say, "Off you go with this"? Or do you have a view on different types of training or how you can kind of help keep everyone on track and aligned and operating in the same way?

Caroline:Yeah, great question. Sometimes I feel personally that the world has gone compliance mad. And I know sometimes that's a strange thing to say, but we have to remember there's a human being in the core of what we're trying to do here, right? It's the human in human resources.

And I mentioned already about it being a balancing act, right? Our role as HR practitioners is to educate leaders and managers to approach situations in a coaching style, I would say, applying listening skills, empathy, understanding to each situation, instead of immediately toeing the line of, "Well, this is what our policy says".

A lot of the time, from my experience, our employees want to be heard, and they want to be understood. And I think if we can support our leaders in the business to have those skills to hold space for employees to discuss what their actual needs are, and then knowing your toolkit of policy options, statutory requirements, with your guidance or with the leaders' guidance once they're upskilled, you can then aim to balance the employees' needs with that of the business.

And there's a model within the coaching sphere that's called the GROW model, and that's educating managers in approaching those kinds of situations with team members in terms of what's the goal, what's the employee looking for, what's their current reality, what are the options for resolution, and then what's the way forward. It's a handy one to use.

There have been times I've seen business leaders take a risk. For example, if there's an extenuating circumstance, they might loosen the policy slightly and provide a greater amount of, let's say, paid sick leave other than what the policy allows for. Let's say there was a significant medical issue for a team member. But that decision comes with a risk, right? Because if you step outside your policies, there's going to be a knock-on effect.

I think instead of thinking about, "We have to stick to our policies. We have to be consistent", it's up to the business leaders to decide are they going to weigh up the risks associated with making a decision to steer away from the policy or not in lieu of culture and in lieu of supporting their team member.

So I think ultimately our role is to educate business leaders, give them their options, and ultimately let them make the decision based on how invested they are towards culture compliance. And trying to strike a balance is an interesting one.

The other piece there I suppose you mentioned was training. And I think, in a very practical sense, manager training is vital, especially when you see leaders getting promoted. They might be very technically strong in their roles and maybe without people leadership experience, and then they're promoted, and then there's a bit of a gap in terms of the training.

So I think it's really, really important to make sure that we provide things like quarterly webinars where we host information sessions to upskill managers on seasonal highlights.

The other thing is managers are very busy, and it's hard to secure time out of the business for them to work on their development and their training. So you do need to get a senior buy-in in terms of releasing the managers.

Communicating regularly is important, and manager monthly emails can be helpful in terms of top tips for each of the months ahead. Lunch and learns.

And then also, as an HR practice, I think it's important to keep a policy review going frequently, at least once a year, to make sure you're reviewing your policies in line with your statutory requirements, and then making sure that you're not leaning too heavily towards compliance and it's going to negatively impact on your culture. Are you being too rigid or are you allowing a degree of flexibility?

So they're just kind of the practical ways, I suppose, that I've seen work well in terms of addressing that kind of knowledge shortfall in the business in terms of the different family leave types and what you can do to support development in that space.

Aoife: Yeah, that's really interesting. And risk appetite, which you mentioned, is obviously a big thing. That's also something that's going to differ, isn't it, from company to company and leadership to leadership? And then that regular training.

I mean, I was almost thinking while you were talking about how we've seen this kind of big uptake recently in non-bias training and people being able to think and be aware of different things that are outside of their world and their own background.

And with employment law, you also mentioned the yearly update to make sure that everything is up to date with statutory obligations. I don't know if there's another area out there that is seeing the change that employment law has seen over recent years. The number of new regulations and new statutes every year, there's a lot in it.

We even saw changes with sick leave kind of on and off over the past few years. For example, the medical care leave. That's still relatively new, and depending on what your organisation is like, maybe not everybody is aware of it.

I think also just helping managers to be aware of and training also in how to respond to these situations, sometimes with empathy, being familiar with what their team's rights are, and also being able to understand what it's like to be in a situation that you might not have been in.

For example, before I had children or before I had to deal with sick elderly relatives or something like that, I personally will put my hand up and say I'm embarrassed to say I did not have that same level of understanding. And I probably didn't offer support or empathy or understanding that I could have in the past to colleagues.

So when we're looking at different types of training for managers, that can be a useful one to roll into it as well, I think.

But yeah, it all kind of comes down to our culture, our policies, our procedure, our training. And then I think the very nature of dealing with unexpected sick leave is it's going to be unpredictable. It's not necessarily going to fit into a neat little box. We'll do what we can to guide you with our policies. Sometimes they'll have to escalate.

And also, another thing we can teach them during training is who, how, where, and when to go when they need to escalate and having that point of contact. That can help with things like that consistent approach again as well, can't it? If we have a centralised point of contact for the guidance when it's needed, that . . .

You talked about that fear factor for HR, and if I go outside of the box and I allow for something different, what kind of precedent am I setting? It's capable of growing arms and legs if you've got John and Mary and Jack and Joe all going outside the box and kind of allowing all sorts of different situations. So I think trying to keep it that one centralised point of contact can be quite useful as well.

But yeah, I do also think that we're quite lucky. As I said at the start of this situation, we are at a point in time now where there are lots of different options available out there for people to avail of in different circumstances. And it's just about identifying the right one.

So, Laura, I don't know if any questions have started coming in yet or if there's anything that anybody who's listening today would like to ask us. We're happy to take a pause and take any questions, if there are any in yet.

Laura:Yes, there are a couple of questions in. One of the first questions goes back to, Aoife, when you were talking through the medical care leave. And I'll just reiterate to everyone that you will get the slides in an email after the webinar, so don't worry. You will have access to those so you can read through Aoife's slides.

The question was how many days of medical leave per annum are employees actually entitled to?

Aoife: So it's five days at present. I don't know if that's set to go up or down any time soon, but it's 5 days in a 12-month period, and it is unpaid, unless your company has its own different arrangements. You can obviously, like anything, go above and beyond that. You can offer paid days.

I do think that the world we live in now with flexible and remote working kind of allows for a compromise or a happy medium where you're like, "Whoever is sick, I'm going to work from home that day". And depending on what they have, if you can pop your child on the sofa while you work away, while they sleep or watch a bit of TV, that's another one that can work as well. But it's currently five days for the medical care leave.

Laura: Five days unpaid. Okay. Sorry, go ahead, Caroline.

Caroline: Yeah, just on that as well, there isn't a big uptake on that because it's unpaid in practice. And what I'm seeing is that employers prefer to give a degree of flexibility, working back the hours, trying to change it up for the team member a little bit like that.

So I think it's helpful to have it there, for sure, but it doesn't seem to be utilised in the spirit in which it was supposed to be originally. Probably from the unpaid side, I would say.

Aoife: Yeah, I've heard similar feedback from clients as well. And even just anecdotally talking to friends and colleagues, that does kind of seem to be the case.

I think if there's the option to maybe continue in your working day and still get paid as normal versus take the unpaid day, a lot of people will do that. But that's obviously not going to apply for every role. For some roles, you just have to be on site. So it's something that's there.

And we mentioned earlier on, as well . . . it was slightly off topic, but when there is that unpaid option available, something that we see people asking for a lot and asking can they allow for it, is, "Can I take a day of annual leave instead?" Caroline touched on this earlier. Obviously, that's not what annual leave is meant to be for. It's meant to be a day of rest. And employers are obliged to make sure that their employees are getting that rest that they need.

That said, if it's just the one day and it's just a one-off and it's at the request of the employee, I think you'd have to be very unlucky to end up finding yourself being penalised for that or having a complaint made against you, or the object of an inspection or something. But it does happen, and it's just something to be mindful of.

Again, it will depend on risk appetite, which we touched on earlier, but I know in practice a lot of people do allow for it. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do. Strictly speaking, it's not. But I think if it's just the one day, it's relatively low risk. And just to point out that that does happen as well.

Laura: Yes, there was a question that came in there just on parents and can you ask them to take annual leave if a child gets sick, which will happen.

There is another question just related to the unpaid medical leave and force majeure leave. Could you talk a little bit about the difference between those two? Maybe give a practical example, because I even kind of get confused. They're quite similar.

Aoife: It is confusing, isn't it? So the force majeure leave is more for what they would call an emergency or urgent situation. So somebody's had an accident and has been rushed to the hospital, and you need to be there to care for your child. For example, maybe they fell, they broke their arm.

It's not for coughs and colds. It's not for Ethan, who's my eldest . . . that's the name that came into my head. Ethan was vomiting last night, or he has a cough or a cold and I'm going to take force majeure leave for that. I can't. It's not for your day-to-day stuff. That's what medical care leave has been brought in to try and support and facilitate. It's your day-to-day, run-of-the-mill-type illness.

And as I said earlier, the categories are a little bit wider in that as well. It can be somebody who's in the same household as you. We've still got the parent, the grandparent, the sibling, and a child.

I think when it comes up in practice, it usually is for a sick child more often than not, or a parent. That's where I seem to see the queries coming in around.

Laura: We have lots of questions coming in, so if it's okay, we might just continue on this vein because this is a great way to learn about the different leaves. Caroline, maybe this is something that you touched on earlier around consistency in the organisation. So the question is, "Does the manager's discretion on leave not need to be consistent across the organisation?" I suppose because one person might say, "Well, you're treating me unfavourably compared to another employee".

Caroline: Yeah, 100% I would agree with that. So this is where, when you upskill your managers, you're creating that kind of level of understanding whereby they know they can go within these certain perimeters to a certain degree.

I'll give you one example. I previously worked for a company where compassionate leave actually wasn't just specifically for bereavement leave, and they had budgeted and factored in three paid days in a situation where there was an emergency. So it was similar to the vein of, I suppose, force majeure, but they packaged it under compassionate leave.

And then the managers were able to apply a little bit of discretion, staying within the policy of something being considered as compassionate leave and having the flexibility in that, but only up to the three days.

So it's not about doing something that the business isn't agreeing with, but it's about knowing the suite of options that you've written into your policies, knowing what that particular band is, and explaining to the leaders how they can move within those bands without breaching the policies to find the best solution for their team members.

Laura: Yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much. Sorry, just running through the questions here. They're coming in thick and fast, which is great. In regards to sick leave . . . so I think this refers to statutory sick pay. Can an employer enforce the first one or two days as being unpaid and pay for the remainder? Does that make sense, Aoife?

Aoife: You need to have a look at the policy. I mean, there can be some wiggle room and there was some case law to say, "If we have a policy in place that kind of comes out better off overall than what the statutory provides, we can do it that way". But you would need to take a look at the policy in the whole on that one, I think.

Laura: Yeah. Just, again, back to a child being sick, can a parent work from home and mind that child? This person is saying that they're a parent also. And I've definitely been in that situation myself where I'll just say, "I'll just work from home", but actually found it almost impossible personally to actually get work done. What's your view on that? Tricky, isn't it?

Caroline: I suppose, in practice, what we do is . . . there have been occasions where that has been allowed, right? And again, if there is a hybrid capacity within your contracts and the person is permitted, that wouldn't be out of scope for someone to be able to take that option, where you're going to find the challenge is in terms of that person being able to get their work done. That's where maybe a bit of flexibility on the team member's part is to maybe put in the additional hours to catch up on what they missed out on.

But again, it comes back to culture, and it comes back to the flexibility written into your policies to support that team member. If you have a strong-performing team member that never needs to be supervised and you know that they're going to get their work done regardless, I don't see that there's a massive issue with that.

Laura: Yeah.

Aoife: And I'll add to that . . .

Laura: I suppose [inaudible 00:33:33] happening every week . . . Yeah, go ahead, Aoife.

Aoife: All I was going to say was just that there's no statutory entitlement. And, like Caroline suggested, it's kind of a company approach in what you can and can't facilitate.

And obviously, as the questions have picked up on as well, a theme that we're discussing today that's running through is how you do it consistently and fairly and don't subject yourself to claims of unfairness or discrimination or whatever it might be.

So it's a difficult balancing act, and that is the truth of the situation. It can be difficult to manage these situations and apply things consistently. But I mentioned earlier about kind of peppering your policies and procedures with language that tries to allow for flexibility and departure in very certain circumstances. And sometimes you're just going to have to make these calls on a case-by-case basis.

If it is unusual or if you are seeing something that's alarming or causing concern, whoever your external employment lawyers are, reach out to them and pick up the phone and talk it through. You won't necessarily need to get a whole advice on it, but sometimes you just need to sense-check or bounce something off them. They'd be more than happy to do that because then it saves a big claim landing on the desk further down the line that maybe could have been avoided.

So that's always an option, too. I think I can speak for most employment lawyers out there when I say we're always happy to just take a call and sense-check something and talk it through. For the queries that do come that are going to go that far, that need that call, it's warranted and it's worth taking the time to do it, I think, in advance.

Laura:Great. Thank you so much. What's your advice on interchanging between sick leave entitlement and time off for scheduled medical appointments? I suppose those are two different things, aren't they?

Aoife: Yeah. I mean, again, there will be a bit of company policy there on that one as well. It's just if you're sick, you're sick, and if you're attending an appointment, you're attending appointments. If your policy blurs them, which a lot of policies do, you'll have to be guided by what's in your policy, really, won't you?

It can go back to, I suppose, if we're dealing with someone who has a long-term illness or a recognisable disability. And there's more to that than when you're looking at your reasonable accommodations and what you need to accommodate in that situation as well. So that kind of would depend on the situation and what you're dealing with there. Not a one-size-fits-all answer. Sorry.

Caroline: I suppose in practice then, from the other side, employers tend to ask people if they are . . . We obviously want people to feel they're supported in their well-being, and if they wanted to take an early morning or a later appointment in the evening so it's at start or end of their shifts, and that could be supported with working time back. I've seen employers apply flexibility in that regard as well. So it's about being supportive and meeting the needs of business at the same time and balancing it.

Laura:Okay. Question here around accrued annual leave, what's the best practice about use of accrued annual leave following extended leave? For example, maternity, parent's, parental. Can employers require that it be used prior to return to work?

Aoife: Employers do have the ability to, within reason, dictate when annual leave is taken, again, depending on what your policy is around carrying over annual leave. In practice, I would say most people do require that and most people do want to take it. It actually usually works quite well, especially if people are trying to extend with that paid period of leave at the end.

So obviously, we've got our ordinary maternity leave where you've got the 26 weeks where you're entitled to your social welfare payment, and a lot of employers will top that up at the same time. Then you've got your 16 weeks' additional maternity leave, which is unpaid unless your employer pays it. And not everybody does pay for that. In fact, I think most employers don't pay for that additional period. So you're looking at quite a long period of unpaid leave.

You often see an overlap then with parent's leave, which we have now. I think it's gone up as far as nine weeks. And that comes with the benefit of a social welfare payment as well.

So you'll often kind of see your parent's leave, your annual leave, your maternity leave all running back-to-back.

One thing I would just say to be mindful of is to draw the employee's attention to the fact that if they switch over to annual leave, that does end their maternity leave and, I suppose, the different protections that tie in with that. So it's just usually, I think, best practice to bring that to their attention.

But there are a number of ways to extend the leave, and I would suggest having, if you can, a discussion with your employees in advance of them going on maternity leave.

A lot of programmes that I've seen that are run by employers, by clients, by law firms that I've worked in, and I've gone through them myself as a mum, they'll run a session with the employee in advance before they go on leave. They'll make clear if there are any requirements around taking leave, what can and can't be taken where.

Some employers will also do a really helpful exercise where they'll tot up, "This is what you'll have before you go. These are the number of public holidays and annual leave that you'll have accumulated over the course of your leave, if you want to have a think about how you're going to take that". And they could say, "In our experience, a lot of people tend to try and kind of add it all together to extend that period", and you can have the conversation.

I think open communication is really the best way to deal with someone because, as we all know, whether it's a first-time mother or a second- or third-time mother, it's different for everyone. Some people can't wait to get back to work. Other people are heartbroken coming back to work. So it's all about just open communication and expectations as well, and then just taking a look at what's in your policy in terms of carryover.

Caroline: Yeah, I think HR professionals should sit down with team members as well, like you said there, Aoife. I've seen a lot of employers create and design "returnity" programmes to support parents coming back into the workforce after extended periods of leave.

And I've seen in practice, just back to your point, Laura, about annual leave being taken in bulk at the end of maternity leave once the person has exhausted all the leave that they intend to take, then maybe take the full month to work through their accrued annual leave. This is better for the business as well in a lot of cases to burn through that. So in practice, it is happening fairly frequently.

Aoife: Actually, this popped into my head as we're talking. I have seen as well in the past where an employee will ask to spread that annual leave out to kind of help with a phased return to employment. So coming back on a three- or four-day week and using the annual leave to do it that way. That's obviously by agreement, but it can work really well in some cases because it helps to ease the parent back in.

And it also provides . . . you're not taking a drop in salary at the same time after what could be an extended period of unpaid leave, depending on whether they took their unpaid portion of the mat leave as well.

Laura: Thank you so much. Lots of questions around the medical leave piece. You're saying this is a fairly new entitlement. They said they have numerous teachers who will phone them in the morning and request force majeure leave, as their son, for example, is vomiting and they can't send him to creche. Is that the right leave that they should take? I know you've already said it, but just to be clear, is that what you would advise, or is it the medical leave?

Aoife: I would think that would be a case of medical care leave, yeah.

Laura: Medical care leave. Okay.

Aoife: I think I mentioned it earlier, and I was thinking this myself earlier, I don't necessarily think it's a fair definition. Certainly, what feels like an emergency or an urgent care situation to a parent when you're in that situation isn't necessarily what the legislation means. I know I've been there myself. You get the call, and it's urgent to you. I need to go and pick them up. He's really sick. He's got a really high temperature. But that would be your medical care leave as opposed to your force majeure.

Force majeure really is more like there has been quite a serious accident. They're in the hospital. I need to be by their bedside. It's quite serious, quite urgent. Your presence is essential, it's indispensable. Whereas the medical care is more for your day-to-day. Even if they are sick and they need to go to the doctor, that's not in force majeure territory.

Laura: And there is a question there around can employees take medical care leave for themselves instead of regular sick leave? But I presume it's only for others, that you're in medical care for others? Is that right?

Aoife: That's right, yeah. You've got your statutory sick leave entitlements there, your five days with the proportionate pay, up to 70%/€110. But most employers do have a sick scheme in place, I find, and certainly with the types of clients we work with, and they tend to go over and above. There are different insurance schemes that kind of drop in at certain points in time, depending on how long an illness runs for. So, yeah, unfortunately not.

Laura: Brilliant. Any last thoughts? We are reaching quarter to 12 soon, so we'll wrap up shortly. I appreciate there were lots of questions coming through there. But Aoife, Caroline, anything else to add before we wrap up for the webinar?

Aoife: I probably touched on this already. I think having a look at your policies, your procedures. They are your first port of call. Your culture, your training, how things are communicated internally, what level of training is given to the gatekeepers, which I think Caroline called them, which I think is brilliant. Yeah, just staying on top of it and being consistent insofar as you possibly can be.

Where there's something far afield or really unusual that's come up, don't hesitate to get the legal advice in advance and nip it in the bud before it becomes a problem. It can often save you a lot of pain further down the line.

That's not me trying to sell lawyers, because they generally won't even charge you for a short [inaudible 00:43:42], to be honest. It's just sometimes it's easier to kind of get ahead of these things if you can. But that'll be it for me.

Laura: Brilliant. Thanks, Aoife.

Caroline: From my side, I suppose, your audience are seasoned HR professionals, right? And there's never a day goes by where we don't learn something new. I think we need to remember that we are also a peer group, and we need to be leveraging each other's friendships and support systems in order to bounce queries off each other when they arise.

I have people that I've worked with in the past I've kept chat groups with. If somebody comes up with a query that we're thinking, "Well, how would we apply that?" we can bounce it off each other as well.

It's about leveraging, obviously, our consultants and our legal advisers, but it's also leveraging each other and our knowledge base and the network of people we have around us, and to be brave and don't be afraid to go to those networking events and say hello and get to know people. Essentially, your peer group is a vital source of knowledge for you as well, and it can only complement your practice as an HR professional.

Aoife: That's brilliant.

Laura: Thank you both so much. We're actually at time, so I will pause it there. I actually think there's enough in this topic to nearly do a full-day event at Legal-Island. The quality of questions that were coming in were great, so thank you to all the attendees.

It's a very complex area. I think you have to be super clear about the differences between each of the leaves and have that really clear in your policy, but like you said, Aoife, allowing that room for a little bit of flexibility. And Caroline, I loved that piece around the coaching as well, actually educating our leaders, educating our managers on how to have these conversations with empathy and listening. As we all know, life happens, and things can go wrong any day, and we ourselves might need to invoke some of these policies. So thank you both so much.

Before we go, folks, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about Legal-Island's new and improved Employment Law Hub. So there is lots of information on these types of leaves on our Hub. It's an essential online resource for HR professionals. So if you want to have a look at our articles, do sign up for our 14-day free trial, and you can access those. The website is there, legal-island.ie.

And finally, it's almost here, Legal-Island's biggest event of the year. It's our Annual Review of Employment Law, and it returns to the Aviva Stadium on 27 November.

This year, we have a fantastic line-up that you don't want to miss. We have top employment law experts, including Deirdre Malone, Head of Employment at EY Law. We've Jennifer Cashman from RDJ, Duncan Inverarity of A&L Goodbody, and many more brilliant speakers to share their expert insights.

I've just found out our in-person tickets have actually completely sold out, which is great news. But don't worry, you can still be part of the action. You can join a waiting list if you want to go in person, or you can grab an online ticket, and you are able to tune in from wherever you are. They are selling fast, so don't miss your chance to join Ireland's leading employment law event of the year.

I'd just like to take a moment to thank Aoife and Caroline for their insights and practical solutions. I appreciate there was a lot in that topic, and hopefully we got through as many questions as we could.

Thank you to Gosia for offering her tech support in the background and, of course, to our sponsors, MCS.

Thank you all for attending and for your excellent questions. We'll see you at our next webinar. Take care.

Sponsored by: