Ms Clare Dunne:

I am saying nine months. We will consider everything but I agree with the previous speaker that nine months is probably the outer limit. We engage on an ongoing basis very closely with all of these sectors. In terms of care assistants, we are keenly aware of the demands of the nursing home association - I cannot remember the organisation's name - and we are also engaging with the Department of Health. We sit on top of the system, as it were, in terms of the policy around the granting of employment permits, but we are not experts in each of these individual sectors. We rely closely on the knowledge of the lead Department in a particular sector. In the case of horticulture or meat processing, that is the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine as well as the sector itself. In the case of care assistants for nursing homes, it is the Department of Health. We are engaging with them on an ongoing basis and the Department of Health officials are telling us they are not convinced at this point that there is a case made to open up the employment permits system to bringing in care assistants. They in turn are engaging with the sector. What they are saying is that the sector needs to do a bit more work here. They believe the evidence points to issues around retention and that the sector is not paying these workers sufficiently to employ them locally. Remuneration, hours of work and the possibility of career progression are all issues within that sector that need to be addressed to some extent. That was a condition, for example, when we opened up the system to certain areas in agriculture. We made sure that they looked at retention issues. Rather than simply agreeing with a sector that it can continue to pay low wages and have long hours and poor working conditions, the sector itself needs an incentive to change to make it more attractive, as it were. No sector can rely forevermore on bringing in cheap labour. That is not a sustainable proposition.