Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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307. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the number of additional staff to be taken on in her Department and in all individual State agencies and bodies under her aegis in 2017; the cost of hiring additional staff in her Department and in each individual State agency and body, in tabular form; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [2496/17]

Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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An additional €3 million in Pay that I secured in Budget 2017 is targeted specifically to assist in our response to the evolving Brexit scenario. It will enable the Department and its Agencies to recruit an additional forty to fifty staff to supplement existing staffing numbers. In this regard, the additional €3 million pay allocation is for distribution across Enterprise Ireland, IDA Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland and the Health and Safety Authority. This will also be utilised to support the dedicated Brexit Unit within my Department, with a staffing resource, led at Principal Officer level, of four staff; this will be reviewed in line with the necessary workload as matters develop.

It is not possible to be specific at this time on the distribution of the additional posts across my Department and each State Agency in 2017 as staffing resources are reviewed as an ongoing priority to ensure my Department’s continued ability to facilitate the wide mission and volume of work in a range of challenging policy areas. My Department engages on an ongoing basis in workforce planning within the context of allocated funding, and with reallocation of staff across my Department as the needs of business units evolve. This will continue during 2017 with ongoing regular reviews of the appropriate staffing across my Department in response to emerging priorities. I might also mention that my Department entered 2017 with a number of vacancies to be filled through recruitment in conjunction with the Public Appointments Service and/or advertising certain posts across the Civil Service to be filled under the Civil Service mobility programme. Furthermore, the Department is frequently below its minimum staffing levels as we work to fill vacancies created by normal levels of staff turnover. Therefore, it is difficult to be precise as to how staffing levels will move during the year. Nonetheless, I can inform the Deputy that staffing levels are closely monitored to ensure that we remain within pay-budget limits agreed with the Department of Public Expenditure & Reform having regard to key priorities and our workforce planning exercise.

Each Agency is provided with an overall Pay ceiling within which they have some flexibility to align their staffing resources to manage their overall operations and priorities. In addition some Agencies also have Own Resource Income which they may wish to utilise to support their particular priority areas, be that to cover operational Pay costs or some Non-Pay costs, such as running promotional and awareness campaigns, to be agreed with my Department. As with the Department itself, responding to individual key strategic priorities and individual workforce planning exercises, each Agency works with my Department to ensure each remains within agreed pay-budget limits.