Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)

We do not know if they all got through or if they all had the language skills or passed the tests. We put a huge effort into encouraging people to apply for that and 92 did. I should say we have had a strategy since I was last in the job. It was one of my priorities the last time to try to encourage more people and we have seen an uptick in the number of people going into the system but it is very slight. We want more people to go into the system. That is a priority for the Government. We should have more people over there. Ireland is not the only member state in this position. There are other countries like us. Denmark, for example, is in a similar position. We do not have enough people in the institutions based on the size of our country.

We also have a lot of long-serving members of staff at senior levels who have just retired or about to retire in the next few years. There are quite a number of them in senior roles who are good workers for Europe but also good points of contact for us. We have brought in schemes. There is significant support from the Department. There is an email address people can contact to get support to get through the process. We also have funded seconded national experts, in other words, civil servants who go from Ireland to work for the institutions for a period. The hope is that some of them will end up staying there so they can be the Irish people over there.