The Minister recognises that County Kerry is definitely the tourism capital of Ireland. That is an undisputed fact. Yet, we have a problem at the moment, which is workers. Businesses, in particular, small businesses in our tourism sector, such as in pubs, restaurants, shops and hotels have a difficulty. I am sure that difficulty is probably reflected throughout the rest of the country, but I am talking about County Kerry. It may be the cost of going to work that has gone wrong or it may come down to the availability of workers, but we have a situation that I have never seen before. Excellent places that provide an excellent service are now, instead of being open seven days and seven nights, open for three nights or four nights, because they cannot get staff for the other nights. I respectfully ask the Minister and the Government what, if anything, can be done to try to rectify this and put it right. It is a shame to think of businesses that can provide a good service not being able to do so because of a lack of workers.

I assure the Deputy that this is an issue all over the country, and not just in the kingdom of Kerry. There are staff shortages across a range of sectors. The unemployment rate is now less than 5%. This was confirmed again earlier by the Central Statistics Office. That is good news, but it does create challenges. We are looking at this in the context of different initiatives, such as, for example, the critical skills employment permit. We have dedicated many extra resources there. Applications are now being turned around in under six weeks. That is a major improvement on where we were recently. We are now allowing students to work for extra hours in the summer, and this will not come against them in relation to their Student Universal Support Ireland grants. I have asked my officials, working with their counterparts in other Departments, to identify the blockages in the system that might deter people from taking on extra hours or that might prevent them from taking up jobs. It should be the case that work always pays. Doing more work should always pay. There are issues there in the system that do not always lend themselves to that objective. I have asked that some work would be done to examine those issues quickly.