Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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54. To ask the Minister for Trade, Enterprise and Employment the average length of time from referral to a hearing at the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC; his plans to recruit additional staff to deal with the backlog; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [17077/20]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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In June this year, the WRC reported a median time to a hearing of 3.5 months; this compares with 4 months for the same period in 2019. The emergency measures introduced in an effort to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus have imposed challenges on how to proceed with complaint adjudication in a fair and procedurally safe manner. This is likely to be reflected in median times later this year.

Nonetheless, the WRC, following a public consultation process, has put in place alternative options to provide an opportunity for parties to have complaints adjudicated by way of either written procedures or “virtual” hearings.

My Department has always and will continue to provide full support to the WRC in the provision of staffing and resources to assist in addressing their workload. To this end, an open competition to recruit additional in-house adjudicators will be advertised by the Public Appointments Service in the coming weeks. In addition, an open competition to establish a further panel of external adjudicators, to supplement the WRC's adjudication capacity on a contract for services basis, will be advertised towards the end of the year.