On 23 September 2026, Vale appeared before the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament. She was invited by Mary Sherlock TD to give her academic opinion on the Organisation of Working Time (Reproductive Health Related Leave) Bill 2021, which would give employees a right to paid leave for fertility treatment and other reproductive health needs.
Vale is an assistant professor of human resource management, and she co-leads ReproWork, a research project on how fertility treatment and employment affect each other. Her opening statement starts at about 2:00 in the video and runs to about 11:35. The recording has subtitles in Catalan, Spanish and Italian.
What Vale said
Why the Bill is needed
- About one in six adults experiences infertility at some point, and most have to go through treatment while working.
- Treatment is demanding on time and changes at short notice. The employers’ confederation IBEC estimates that women often need six to eight days of flexibility around tests, scans and procedures.
- That is far harder for a teacher, a shift worker or anyone paid by the hour. In a recent Irish study of about 800 women doctors, 86% of those who sought treatment had trouble getting it while working.
- Today people patch it together with annual leave, sick leave and informal favours, and many prefer not to tell their employer at all. In an international survey from 2025, nearly two in five people in treatment had left their job or thought about it.
- Employer policies are patchy. In an IBEC survey of nearly 300 organisations, 72% said fertility support mattered to them, but only 11% offered paid fertility leave.
- Public funding for assisted reproduction (introduced in Ireland in 2023) lowers the cost of treatment, but it does not settle whether someone can get time off work to attend it.
What the Bill does
- It sets a legal right to up to 10 working days of paid reproductive health leave a year, separate from annual and sick leave. Flexibility stops being a favour asked of a manager and becomes an entitlement.
- It is a floor, not a ceiling: employers and unions can still agree something better.
- It treats fertility treatment as healthcare, adds confidentiality duties for employers, keeps employment rights during the leave and protects against unfair dismissal for using it.
- Vale pointed to similar protections in France, Malta and Belgium.
What she would improve
- Partners. The Bill covers the employee in treatment but gives no separate right to a partner who may need to be there at key moments.
- Treatment abroad. Irish patients often travel for treatment, so the leave should cover foreign providers too, not only a doctor registered in Ireland.
- Count hours, not days. Under the current wording, a part-day absence counts as half a working day, so a 90-minute appointment uses up half a day of the entitlement. Counting in hours, as Malta does, would fit how treatment actually works and make the leave go much further.
Her closing point
Infertility is a health condition and its treatment is healthcare. A national minimum will not remove every difficulty, but it changes where responsibility starts: from repeated individual negotiation to a recognised right that employers and unions can build on. Access to reproductive healthcare should not depend on having the right employer, the right contract or the right kind of job. It should not be a privilege.
Recording of the committee proceedings, 23 September 2026. The subtitles were generated automatically and may contain errors.