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8th June 2017
10:05am BST
The Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI) has announced today that "emergency measures" are needed to solve the what they say is a crisis shortage of chefs.
Chief Executive of the RAI, Adrian Cummins says that "some restaurants across the country are being forced to close on Mondays and Tuesday due to the shortage of chefs."
An estimated 5,000 chefs are required by 2018 to fill vacancies, and the RAI say that the lack of training centres for chefs in Ireland has lead to this problem.
Currently 1800 chefs qualify each year from certified culinary training programmes, but some of the applicants aren't deemed to be qualified enough and so RAI are calling to bring back CERT, the State Tourism Training Agency, which was established in 1963.
CERT was responsible for providing a trained workforce for the hotel, catering and tourism industry, and industry experts hope that 10 new training centres will be invested in.
In the meantime, the RAI are seeking to partner with chef training colleges from around the world to attract qualified chefs to Ireland.
Mr Cummins added that although they want to make Ireland lead the way when it comes to food excellence, " we are finding ourselves in a position where we have a severe shortage of chefs in Ireland which is now threatening the success of the tourism industry's recovery."
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