Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the delegates for their presentations. As somebody whose sister lived abroad for over ten years and came home in the past couple of years with a husband and a young family, I am aware of some of the challenges in adjusting to life back in Ireland. My sister chose not to live close to the home place but in a rural village about half an hour away. The local school in the village is happy to have my niece and two nephews in it.

She has set up her own business now. They are well settled in. I am aware that it is a difficult adjustment. It would still be a difficult adjustment if every State agency was helping, because when people have lived abroad for a long time, there are changes when they return. I am conscious as well that she had a lot of family support. I imagine that Ms McHugh is talking about people who are closer to retirement age who might be living alone, may not be married, may not have a support network, and their family network at home might also be gone. When we talk about returning emigrants as a cohort, there is a very different image in my mind of a man in his 70s who worked on the buildings in London all his life returning to live and die at home, whose family network and support network might be gone, as opposed to my sister in her 40s with a young family. They are very different. It is key to be mindful that there are different challenges for different returning emigrants.

Deputy Danny Healy-Rae has just left but I wanted to point out that while the unemployment rate is dropping, it is not because people have all emigrated. Our employment rate is rising as well. The glass is a bit half empty in everything he said.

Some of the challenges outlined are a challenge for people living in rural Ireland who never left. Access to housing, private or otherwise, broadband, car insurance and health insurance are all challenges that we have to try to face here as a country. I would like Ms McHugh to outline more about the challenges around the area of the PPS number. That is very specific. What are the challenges in getting a PPS number when one returns? How can we streamline that process? There is the issue of buying a house. If one came home and had the means to buy a house, that is fine. Is the issue here around the ability to get a mortgage? I am not really sure. Mr. Staunton mentioned buying a house in his presentation. He might expand on what the big impediment there is. It might be the access to finance more than anything else. He said that getting electricity has been an issue as well.

These are practical things that we, as a committee, can get our teeth into. I am not dismissing the others, but am saying that they are a challenge for all of us in rural Ireland. The entitlement to the national reserve was mentioned there as well. The national reserve has €52.5 million. It was the biggest pot ever in 2015, and there has been an application to the Commission to get increased flexibility for that. It is financed by a direct cut to existing farmers. Again, the issue might be around the Further Education and Training Awards Council, FETAC, level 6 requirement. I was a farmer before I was a Deputy. I did my green certificate and I did not get access to the national reserve, but I did inherit entitlements at home by going through that process. It is probably a difficulty if somebody is coming home to land in their 40s or 50s and has never done a green certificate or similar. That is going to be difficult to get around, because ultimately we have to be able to display it to Europe, because a lot is European money. We also have to be able to display that people are serious about the farming enterprise that they are going into, and that they have displayed a desire. Is it an issue for returning emigrants to access the necessary training requirements? It is fair enough to expect somebody who wants that entitlement to do a level of training to show their seriousness about farming.