Clare Fine Gael TD Deputy Joe Cooney has welcomed a planned temporary relaxation of the 50:50 rule governing the recruitment of workers from outside the EEA, saying it could help bring community nursing home beds currently lying idle into use and increase home help hours and disability services across the county.
Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke is due to bring a memo to Cabinet proposing that the rule be amended to allow health and social care services facing severe staff shortages to recruit more workers from outside the EEA.
The measure is expected to be temporary, until more Irish workers are trained to fill the roles, with Mr Burke expected to tell Cabinet that healthcare providers are struggling to fill vacancies and that the shortages are putting frontline services under pressure.
The proposed relaxation had previously been raised by Deputy Cooney with Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, Alan Dillon, who has responsibility for employment permits.
In a Parliamentary Question, Deputy Cooney asked whether the proposed flexibility would apply to homecare providers, disability services and community nursing homes, and raised the recruitment and retention pressures facing Section 39-funded organisations.
Deputy Cooney said the proposed change could have a direct impact on the availability of care in Clare.
“I have been raising the need for greater flexibility around the 50:50 rule because of the very real staffing pressures being experienced by care providers in Clare.
“The single biggest issue through my office is inability of homecare providers to deliver all of the hours that people are allocated because they cannot get enough healthcare assistants and carers.
“The temporary relaxation now being proposed is welcome because it will give providers greater scope to recruit suitably qualified staff from outside the EEA where vacancies cannot be filled from the domestic or wider European workforce.
“Of course, we need to continue training and developing our own workforce, as well as addressing the wider recruitment and retention issues, but that takes time, and time is something many families in this situation do not have.
In the meantime, we must make sure essential care services have the staff they need to operate and our older people can get the level of care they have been allocated.”
The existing 50:50 rule requires at least half of an employer’s workforce to be made up of Irish, EEA, Swiss or UK nationals before an employment permit can be issued to a worker from outside the EEA.
Deputy Cooney said the new flexibility should apply across nursing homes, homecare and disability services where genuine staffing shortages exist.
“I specifically raised with Minister Dillon the need to make sure that homecare providers, nursing homes and disability services could all benefit from the proposed flexibility.
“The important thing now is that the change is delivered sooner rather than later, works in practice and helps providers recruit the people they need.
“For people across Clare, the measure should ultimately mean more nursing home beds being made available and more home help hours being delivered to people in their own homes.”