Éamon Ó Cuív on Labour Shortages and Work Permit Limits

One of the perennial mysteries of this country is how many sectors are so short of labour. Time and again, even looking for state services, you hear the mantra that there is no labour available, and therefore the question I ask if there is genuinely no labour available here, we could have that debate, particularly with the Minister for Social Protection and the Minister for Finance in relation to incentives. If labour is not available, what are you going to do to make sure that vital services are available in this country? Thanks, Deputy. The question is related to the permit, so I will focus on that with my answer. In general, we try to analyse and identify areas where there are critical skills gaps or whether there is a shortage of labour. Through our department, we regularly engage with all the various stakeholders through the various forums, but also individually with various sectors, various groups. We do detail analysis twice a year into every sector that we think there are shortages being talked about, and where there is evidence gathered and evidence very clearly identifies that there are shortages, we react and we change, and we change the process in relation to the permits. I will come back to that in a minute, but that is only one addition. The best way to try to deal with labour shortages is to predict it and put the funding into education and all the various supports through all levels of education to address that. That is what we try to do and work more clearly and directly with all the various sectors. We have, through reforms over the last ten years, we have a very enterprise-facing education system through the full education and training, and all the commitment and announcements through apprenticeships and skills and on-the-job training, along with investment in higher education and investment in research and innovation as well to drive an automated process as well. So every effort is made to try to deal with skills gaps and work with the relevant sectors. The issue you asked me in the actual question then is in relation to the permit scheme, the employment permit scheme, and that is a regime that is designed to facilitate the entry of appropriately qualified non-EAA workers to fill skills and labour shortages in Ireland. However, this objective must be balanced by the need to ensure that there are no suitably qualified Irish or EAA nationals available to undertake the work at the shortage as a genuine one. So we do look for real evidence backed up by the parent department that is genuine, but also that every effort is made to source that labour and that talent locally. And it is hard sometimes to explain if you have potentially 40,000 people on pub, another 150,000 people on long-term or short-term social welfare, how we also need to bring in other talent as well. So we try to close those gaps by working through social protection with employers through the range of schemes, namely under the pathways, to work to join the dots there, to try to bring people who have various skills, who upskill them to fill those jobs. And when that can not happen, we do use the permit scheme to bring in people as well. Thank you, Minister. Deputy Mayor Cruz. Minister, on Tuesday night here in the adjournment, I raised the issue of the total shortage of home care workers. Not a skilled job, but a skilled job that does not need much formal qualification. And it seems that the system, in this case the government system, totally find it impossible to get enough people within this state to provide those services. And there are people in critical situations that are not getting care. On the other hand, I understand that the work permit system is so restrictive that it is not possible to bring in where these people are not available to do the home caring. It is not possible to bring them in because it is totally restrictive. Have you had discussions with your colleagues in relation to whether we should issue work permits to people who come in and provide these absolutely vital frontline services in our community? And we saw with Covid how advantageous in many cases home care is as an alternative to nursing home care? Thank you, Chair. There are a couple of issues I will try to deal with. The particular area of home care workers is raised. I did not see your debate during the week, Deputy O'Keefe. It was discussed with the teacher last week on the floor of the House. It is an issue that we have all been commenting on lately as well, and we will engage and are engaging with the home care providers in that sector to try to gather the evidence to make the case. The difficulty we have, and we did do two reviews over the last year since Covid. In April last year we changed the scheme to allow for permits for those of health care assistants who generally work in nursing homes to come in and work because there is a lot of evidence that shows there was a shortage there. There was an agreement with the HSE department that they were needed and there was a way the Australian regime put in place to facilitate that. Phase two of that then was the demand then for workers in the home. We have tried to engage with the providers there and they have gathered evidence with us and we are working through that evidence. However, on the last review just completed in the last few weeks, the evidence was not there to show that there is a need to revert to the permit scheme to bring skills or labour in from abroad. The biggest issue that we have to try to tease through is that the 75 per cent of the people who work in that sector at this moment in time are part-time. I understand quite a number of them might choose to be part-time, but that is where we have to go deeper and we have to analyse that, and the Department of Health are involved in that process. Minister, the reality is that it is cold comfort to somebody who is waiting for care to be told that all these processes have been gone through and in the meantime there are no services. But we know that labour shortletters are endemic in this society. We have to import most of the deckhands on fishing boats. There are hold-ups and licenses there. We are totally short, amazingly, of people in hospitality who constantly tell us that they cannot hire people. Maybe I am looking at the wrong end of the story and maybe another issue that will come under the remit of your department is more relevant here. That is the issue of a living wage to make it attractive to work and this interface between gain for work versus social welfare. If you want to address that issue rather than the work permits, I would be interested. I would also be interested in what exactly are you doing to streamline the whole process of work permits? I would like to point out that the Department of Health is driving a lot of changes to make work pay and to make sure that the conditions and the rates of labour and backed by the government are making it more and more attractive to try to attract people into work. You mentioned another sector, hospitality. On one hand, there are thousands of jobs available in the hospitality sector and we have given permits and prioritised certain areas in relation to chefs and so on. On the other hand, if you analyse the live register and those in pub payments, there are thousands with a hospitality background. There is a mismatch there which will try to close that gap. Yes, it is paying conditions, yes, it is choices and people are re-evaluating their careers and we will try to again support that. A lot of money is set aside through education and the upskilling agenda. The Pathways to Work is a scheme that I would ask employers of all these sectors to engage with to attract labour as well. The issue in relation to the farmers and, again, in conjunction with the Department of Health, we did make 100 permits available to bring in dairy farmers as well. My own sense is that that will not be enough, but I have to work with the relevant departments and the relevant agencies and notably the IFA and so on in that sector to be able to gather that evidence, but we do react quite quickly and have 100 at the moment. In the next review, we can increase that if there is proven demand, but we do try to work with every sector to encourage them to source labour locally and avail of the support from the government through social protection, through education, through our own department to make that happen as well. Thank you. I have been kind of strict on everybody. I will share the message again, Deputy O'Keepe. Thank you.