Mr. Adrian Cummins:

I will take the question on career progression and Mr. Lenehan will take the question on sustainability. On career progression within our industry, the legacy of Covid is the retention of staff. That is the single biggest learning point we got from Covid, to retain our staff. We had a serious void of employees who left our industry through no fault of their own. They had to find a job somewhere else, or they emigrated or migrated back to their home countries throughout Covid. We are only getting back to our 2019 levels. We are about 10% off where we should be. There was a lot of heavy lifting by the industry itself, by our employees and workers and by employers over the last number of months to try to attract in new staff against other sectors that were trying to attract our staff as well. I think we have done a good job on that. There is a career for everybody within hospitality. We want to portray that it is a good job and we are doing that. Like every other sector, we have issues that we need to resolve. They may be employers that do not engage in best practice. We need to root them out or re-educate them. We have that in every sector of the economy. I believe we have made great progress around that.

We sill have a deficit in certain skills, such as cheffing. We are going to have a deficit within cheffing for the foreseeable future. The attraction of non-EU nationals coming into Ireland for cheffing is very important. A great deal of work has been done between the trade associations, Government officials and the Department around that and the waiting lists have been reduced. We need to get to a single application point where people apply for their visa and their permit all in the one go as opposed to getting the permit and then applying for the visa. People do not know whether they are coming or going. That is where we need to get to, like a modernisation of our system. The turnaround time has been reduced substantially. We may need to look at designated countries. The French do this very well in hospitality and tourism. They have designated four non-EU countries for priority for hospitality employees coming in, namely Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. They are predominantly former French-speaking countries. They are the designated ones. That is being supported by the European Union also.

There was a question earlier about how we can help asylum seekers here to get work. Our doors are open but we need to get the turnaround time for a PPS application as quick as possible. Sometimes we see issues around that. It is a problem for us. There is an adjacent issue around non-EU students working here. Obviously they can work for 40 hours per week outside term time but during term time they are limited to 20 hours per week. We should look at those hours per week and maybe increase the limit. There needs to be a conversation around what is appropriate for the course they are on. We need to have a conversation about that as opposed to refusing to do so. We need to look at it with a more up-to-date approach.