Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I assure Deputy Cowen that every effort will be made by our Department to put enough staff in place and to change the system to make sure we can process these permits. As I have outlined, there has been an increase in staff on these teams. There are more than 50 additional people in the system and many of the existing staff are working overtime and every night they are allowed to work in order to deal with the backlog. With the plan we have put in place, we will get through this backlog in the next few months and get back on track to normal processing times. We are committed to monitoring the level of applications because I expect this demand to continue for a period. We will monitor that and keep staffing at the level required to deal with that and keep on track. We pride ourselves on having a very strong permit regime, which has worked quite well up until now and responds generally to the needs of the various sectors. Processing times of 18 to 20 weeks are not acceptable and we will not continue with that. I guarantee that there is a plan in place and that those the numbers will come back down.

I echo the Deputy's comments. The Government, including the Ministers for Social Protection, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, and Education, and I are happy to work with any sector with identifiable needs. We do a lot of analysis in our Department on the future needs analysis of the various sectors and we have put many reforms in place in the educational system to respond to that. The Deputy touched on the importance of the apprenticeship schemes and the further education and training sector. Our ETBs are ready and able to respond and work locally and nationally with various sectors to turn out the skills they need. There are still quite a number of people on jobseekers' payments or the PUP and we ask that they avail of the various supports to get back into work, retrain or take the subsidies for employees and employers in these sectors. I am conscious that even with that, certain sectors will need skills from abroad. We will work with them to make this an option but in the long term we would like to see those jobs filled from within the country, or certainly from within Europe, if at all possible. We are happy to work with Deputy Cowen or any of the industries he has mentioned on that.

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