The issue surrounding work permits is reaching a crisis level for many employers. A growing number of employers in the healthcare, food processing, hospitality, agriculture and transport sectors are battling through a system that is fraught with long delays and refusals based on minor human errors on their applications. This triggers an appeals process that is taking up to 18 weeks to complete. The vast majority of these errors could be rectified by simply communicating directly with the applicant. I have been inundated with calls from exasperated people in all of these sectors across Tipperary who are unable to secure staff in Ireland or within the EU. The lack of a workforce is having a negative impact on productivity, curtailing production, damaging exports and suppressing economic growth. Unless a way is found to fast-track these non-EU work permits, many businesses in these sectors face collapse. I call on the Government to introduce a system that will both simplify and expedite the process of obtaining work permits for the sectors whose survival depends on them.

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. A plan of action is being implemented by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment to meet the challenges of this increased demand and to reduce the processing time, which has built up recently, as the Deputy said. Staffing actions include recruitment of additional permanent and temporary staff which will increase the permanent processing capacity by over 100% and overall capacity by over 200% from November levels. Some 898 employment permits were processed last week, which is more than triple the 259 processed in the same week last year. Waiting times for critical skills employment permits are seven weeks for trusted partners and nine weeks for standard applications. These waiting times stood at 14 weeks for trusted partners and 21 weeks for standard applications only seven weeks ago, so progress has been made. The backlog continues to fall and it is now at 8,851, which is over 2,000 below its Christmas 2021 peak. The rate of applications in 2022 has stabilised at 32,000 applications per annum, which is considerably higher than the 27,000 received in 2021, which itself was well up on previous years. I spoke to the Tánaiste yesterday and to the Secretary General of the Department. We want those numbers down as quickly as possible.