Mr. Tim Fenn:

This is probably the single biggest issue that our industry will face over the next couple of years. As I outlined earlier, our industry was hugely successful in growing employment before Covid. When Covid happened our industry was asked to close, which we did. In fact, we were asked to close again and again but during that time people left the industry. They left for different reasons. Some people had transferable skills and went to work in other industries. Some people left because they could not wait as they had to provide for their families, etc., and some people went home to their own counties.

Ireland now faces the situation where the Irish economy in total has performed extremely well over the last couple of years. Ireland has gone from 25% unemployment right down to less than 5% by the end of the year, possibly. That means we now have an extremely competitive market. Our activities to restore the number of people in our industry and restore skill levels centre around all aspects of our engagement for that with second-level students, transition year programmes, the Get a Life in Tourism magazines. We also engage with the education providers such as the education and training boards, the technological universities and the IHF Skillnet, similar to the RAI. We have a whole raft of structures around that.

The reality is that there is no way that the domestic market can help us completely fill the jobs requirements that we have planned for in the next couple of years. The single biggest issue for us at the moment is that we are hugely successful in training people. They travel the world to run hotels everywhere and are hugely successful in doing that. We are not able to bring anybody back because the structure of the permit system at the moment is completely and utterly dysfunctional. One must apply for one person and 26 weeks later one may or may not get a successful application but that person will have gone to somewhere else in the world. The permit system does not work and that is not right. Somewhere or other the permit structure must change and immediately. It is more than just the number of people that process the permits in the Department. It is about the legal structures around the barriers. I refer to the non-trade tariff barriers that are in place to make sure that nobody can come back into the country. That is a key issue for us.

We ask the Government for support around the structures of identifying the future skill needs in the industry. It is about eight years since we did a detailed report on this and we ask for some money to be spent on that.

There are skilled people in the industry who want to upskill. We would like to put a little bit more money into the off-the-job training. I refer to the commis chef apprenticeship programme, which is one in particular that we are involved with, and also for the chef de partie programme and the other training structures that are in place. Even if we have all of these in place there is something in the order of €1 billion sitting in the national training fund at present but maybe there is always a requirement to have a reserve. We have a national crisis and we would like to see some of that money ring-fenced for the tourism and hospitality sector to help us built up the skills base again.

Earlier we identified some of the challenges around the numbers. We said that there was about 54,000 people now working in hotels and there were 65,000 people before Covid. Within that there is a double element. Some of the people are working and need to be upskilled but there are jobs within there that we just do not have people for. One can place advertisements all day long in the newspapers for senior chefs or whatever but they just do not exist here in Ireland at the moment. We cannot train people quick enough so we would like to see some action regarding permits.