Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I want to recognise the Deputy's work in establishing Balance for Better Business, which is working very well. We are pleased with the results we are getting in increasing the number of women on company boards. However, we need to do a bit more on senior leadership teams where the numbers are not as good, albeit they are moving in the right direction.

On work permits, we have a real problem. There is a 19- to 20-week wait for work permits to be processed and that is down to volume. There has been a 70% increase in applications on last year. That is probably distorted by the pandemic but even if we compare with 2019, there has been an increase of nearly 50% in applications. This is a reflection of the fact that employers cannot get staff, not only in Ireland but from anywhere in the European Economic Area, and are now looking to take people in from outside of Europe. It also reflects that we are allowing more work permits in areas like construction and agrifood where there are big labour shortages. We are staffing up the section, big time. We have gone from 15 or 16 staff to about 50. We are also offering overtime and bringing in staff from other sections to process the permits. A lot of the staff that are now processing permits are doing it for the first time and there is a bit of a learning curve. That said, we anticipate - or at least the Secretary General assures me and the Minister of State, Deputy English - that we will see a big improvement over the next couple of months. It is something we are monitoring on an almost daily basis because we know it is creating real problems for businesses. They have staff who are willing and available to come to Ireland to provide care and to allow businesses to function but they cannot get them in.

On the returnees and jobs fairs, I will have to check on that and get back to the Deputy on it. Generally, that is something that employers rather than the Department would do; we would just help out. The Department of Foreign Affairs has some very good guides on what to do as a returnee, how to get car insurance and so forth. The Department did some very good work on that in the past. I will have to come back to the Deputy and get him a better, more detailed response. The same goes for the question on mobile phone security, which is a cybersecurity issue under the remit of the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications.

We looked at the issue of an export credit insurance scheme a couple of years ago and decided not to go ahead with it. The business case did not really stack up and there was a risk for the taxpayer. We have had some bad experiences with such schemes in the past but we might look at it again.

SCARP is new and is an alternative to court-based examinership. Some people call it examinership light and it is designed to allow companies that would otherwise fail to restructure, renegotiate their debts and survive, allowing them to have another day and keep on their staff. The proof of the pudding is going to be in the eating. We have not yet seen many companies go through the process. I read in the newspapers about one company that is going through the process now, which is a tourism business in County Kerry, but I am not sure of the details of that. We are going to monitor things very closely over the next couple of months to see how many companies go through the process, what their experience is like and how many companies and jobs are saved as a result. It is going to need to be up and running for at least six months, if not a year, before we can do that assessment properly.

The Deputy and I have talked about the former Amgen site in east Cork previously.

I appreciate that he is using this opportunity to raise it again. We as a Department want to see investment on that site. A lot of investment has gone into it already. That is taxpayers' money. We want to see jobs and investment happening on that site.

I take the point the Deputy is making on the roads programme and the need to prioritise public transport but we also need to build roads because we need roads to access housing and IDA Ireland sites. I have asked my officials in the authority to look at the eight projects that are stalled from the point of view of business and enterprise to see which ones should be prioritised. I am getting many representations from people all over the country about road projects that have been slowed or stalled. I want to get a sense from the authority and officials in my Department of which of those are most valuable economically. I will engage with the Minister, Deputy Ryan, on that once I have that analysis done.