Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

The National Employment Rights Authority was established on an interim basis in February 2007. NERA has the following three functional areas: the communications and strategic services unit, which operates an information service ion employment rights legislation and promotes an awareness of employment rights; the inspection services unit, which is responsible for monitoring and enforcing compliance with certain employment conditions for all categories of workers in Ireland, including migrant workers; and the legal services unit, which amongst other things deals with the enforcement of awards by the Labour Court and the Employment Appeals Tribunal through the courts and prosecutes cases on behalf of the inspection services in situations where employers fail to comply with certain employment rights legislation.

NERA currently has 116 staff across five locations, including a team of 69 inspectors. These inspectors are all available for assignment to inspection duties. No inspector is currently in training. Since NERA's establishment, 22 inspectors have left as a result of promotion or internal and external departmental transfers and re-assignments and this has brought the number of inspectors to its current level of 69. The moratorium on recruitment and promotions in the public service has had an impact on NERA in common with all other public bodies.

Providing value for money is a key focus of NERA's operations. In much of its activity in 2009, it managed to increase or maintain service levels despite reduced resources. Its telephone information service provided information to more than 150,000 people in 2009, an increase of over 30% on the 2008 figure. Approximately 129,500 calls were dealt with directly by NERA's experienced information officers and the agency's website, www.employmentrights.ie, recorded more than 1.5 million webpage impressions during 2009. NERA has also played in important role in addressing the backlog in my Department's redundancy payments section.

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