Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I get there are many groups and many people meeting but it strikes me that occupations are not coming off this list. There seems to be satisfaction at Department level that this list is what it is but no effort is being made to ensure the Department of Education is intervening to upskill people where those skills will be required. Certain skills needs will not be met. If a skills requirement has been on the list for ten years, surely at some point an alarm bell would have been raised in the then Department of Education and Skills or in the new Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science to indicate there is an issue. Clearly, the groups are meeting and reviews are happening but I do not see anything emerging from that. However, I will leave it at that.

Some people in my constituency from the Middle East and Africa have raised the issue of jobs on the critical skills occupation list, particularly for sales roles, requiring a fluency in a particular language that is obviously not English. They have fluency in the language but do not have the required sales experience. It is easy to train a person to work in the area of sales but it is difficult to train somebody to speak a language such as Farsi or Zulu. Is there scope or is any effort being made to take account of people who have language skills who would require training in sales? People with language skills are coming here to work and they would need a small amount of training in sales, which is relatively easy to do compared to learning a language. Has consideration been given to taking such an approach and if not, could consideration be given to doing that?