Private companies will contribute 0.3 per cent of the salary of each employee – male or female – into a fund from which maternity leave in the private sector will be paid.

The measure aims to curb gender discrimination in recruitment.

Under this measure, women working in private companies will not get their maternity leave paid directly by their employer. Instead, the money for the first 14 weeks of maternity leave, currently paid by employers, will come out of the fund.

The maternity leave of government employees will continue to be paid by the government, which is also raising the maternity leave benefits it pays to all women between weeks 15 and 18, currently standing at €160 a week.

From January 1, this benefit will be paid at a rate equivalent to theminimum wage, resulting in an increase of over €6 a week.

Self-employed women too will receive an increase in maternity leave benefits for their 14 weeks of leave, again to be equivalent to the minimum wage.

At the moment self-employed women, like the unemployed, receive some €86.77 a week for that period. The Budget measure will mean an increase of some €73 weekly for self-employed mothers.

Free childcare centres will also continue to be offered, as will the Breakfast Club Service that allows children to be dropped off at school an hour earlier.

Adoptive parents will be entitled to maternity leave on the same grounds as biological parents, both in the public and private sectors.

The government says that it will also work to extend adoption agreements, currently in place with Albania and Slovakia, to other countries including Poland, Cambodia and Vietnam.