Mr. Ruair? Creaney:

I will do that. We will hold their feet to the fire to make sure the RSA does that. We will hold the RSA to account to make sure that it follows through. I welcome what has been said. If that is the figure, which the RSA gave, then the union welcomes that but we will continue to put pressure on it to do that. I ask members of the committee to keep in contact with Fórsa. We will follow up with members of RSA management locally to see where they are at with the sanction request. If there are delays then Fórsa will again seek the assistance of the committee. The case has been made very firmly and I am glad to hear the RSA management has moved.

I refer to testers who were let go, an issue touched on by Deputy Smith, and others who are on temporary contracts. The Department is very committed to making sure people on temporary contracts who apply for permanent roles must take part in an open competition. It is obviously Fórsa's preference that that would be a scenario where those temporary testers are made permanent, because they are doing the job already, have been doing it for a number of years, are qualified and have shown they can do the job. Making them permanent makes more sense because people do not have to train again. It takes seven weeks to train a driver tester. By my calculations, it costs between €10,000 and €15,000 to train a driver tester. It also makes economic sense to simply extend their contracts. In addition, if the Department cannot do that, then a fallback option could be a closed competition where the existing temporary testers have the first opportunity to apply for those roles. That would be a good problem to have, if we could do that.