Just off Garville Avenue in Rathgar, south Dublin, a five-storey white-painted building that should be home to scores of older people stands essentially empty and idle.
Builders worked on this €30 million project to convert an older nursing home into a modern facility for about 130 residents, but finished their work months ago.
Garville Private, as it is known, is waiting for its official registration from the State’s health regulator Hiqa, which it needs so that it can open.
But there’s a problem.
The care home’s owners say an inability to recruit sufficient staff from within Ireland and Europe – along with official restrictions on staff that a business can hire from farther afield – may leave the building standing largely empty until planned legislative changes are put in place.
Orwell Healthcare, which owns the facility, says in the meantime it has to pay staff currently in place and meet other costs while no revenue is coming in.
Laura Dunne, deputy chief executive of Orwell Healthcare, says there are already 150 people on a waiting list for the new nursing home. She says the main hospital in the locality, St James’s, is anxiously waiting to move in patients who have completed their acute care.
Legislation introduced in 2024 requires that at least half of an employer’s workforce come from Ireland, the UK, EU, the broader European Economic Area (EEA) or Switzerland before the business can seek an employment permit to bring in staff from elsewhere in the world.
The other 50 per cent can include employment-permit holders, beneficiaries of international or temporary protection or those holding “stamps” giving them residency in Ireland.
Alan Dillon, Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise and Employment, says this policy fulfils Ireland’s obligations under what is known as the “union preference” principles of EU membership.
“The mandatory application of the 50:50 rule underpins the Government’s employment creation strategy by compelling employers in the State to hire in a balanced manner from domestic and EEA labour markets,” he says.
However, Dunne says her company and others in the sector have experienced significant difficulty in operating within these rules.
“If we could get people from the EU, we’d happily do it, but they’re scarce,” she says.
“Basically, we’ve been recruiting from Ireland for Irish and EU staff, and we also recruit overseas, mainly the Philippines and India, for nursing staff.
“In Europe, it’s very difficult. There’s a huge shortage of EU [nurses]. If they were there, we’d happily recruit them. We have engaged with EU recruiters from Romania and Hungary to try to get Hungarian and Romanian nurses – and then the 50:50 [rule] wouldn’t apply. But we haven’t been successful.”
Dunne says private nursing homes are also competing with the Health Service Executive (HSE) for staff but it has an advantage; she cannot match the State’s public health system on pay and overtime rates.
“No, we’re not the same as the HSE, but we have a very good pay rate and a very good package for people coming to the country. We provide subsidised accommodation for them,” she says.
Dunne says nursing homes face additional pressure: staff leaving to work in HSE and other public hospitals.
“We bring in the staff. They might be newly qualified [as nurses] in India. We do a huge amount of training and induction training with them,” she says.
“And the HSE will happily take them because they know in the nursing homes they’ve got great training. So they’ll recruit and we can’t compete with the pay rates and the overtime rates. So we lose a lot of our staff.”
One of the empty rooms in Garville Private in Rathgar, south Dublin. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne for The Irish Times
She says these staff work for the nursing home for years – part of the legal requirement of their employment.
“And after two years, they look to the HSE. They are going to the HSE because [for example] they will get a year’s maternity leave and all those kind of things that private nursing homes can’t provide,” she says.
The nursing home sector has been strongly lobbying the Government to change the law around the 50:50 rule.
Both the representative body for the sector and individual nursing homes have contacted the Department of Enterprise and Employment, which is responsible for the legislation.
In July 2025, , Cowper Care, which has 182 residents across three nursing homes, told Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke it was “facing an acute staffing crisis, particularly in the recruitment of nurses and healthcare assistants”.
“Despite our sustained efforts, we are receiving no applications from EEA nationals for these vital roles”, it said.
Dillon says the department carried out a review of the 50:50 rule and in May the Cabinet agreed to a change of policy.
The departmental review said Ireland applied “one of the strictest interpretations of union preference at employer level and while most sectors comply with the 50:50 rule, healthcare has recently begun to face acute challenges due to significant uptake of healthcare assistant permits”.
“Demand for these permits is expected to rise sharply due to demographic change and limited Irish/EEA/UK/Swiss supply. Retention issues, driven by low pay and poor conditions, risk creating a cycle of dependency on migrant workers without addressing underlying workforce stability,” the review said.
The review found the Department of Health’s long-term strategy was to build domestic labour capacity, “but interim measures are required to maintain service continuity”.
It recommended changing the law to give new powers to the Minister to alter the 50:50 rule for specific sectors.
The department said the legislative amendments were intended to allow the Minister to temporarily adjust the 50:50 rule provisions “in the health and social care sectors only, on the basis of its role in delivering vital services for the public good”.
The Government is coming under pressure both from nursing homes to accelerate the introduction of the new measures and from the haulage sector to extend the reforms.
In a letter to Dillon on June 10th, Irish Road Haulage Association president Ger Hyland expressed concern “that the proposed reform, as currently understood, may be confined to healthcare-related employments only”.
“The road freight sector faces a similarly acute and persistent labour shortage. Haulage operators across the State continue to experience significant difficulties in recruiting sufficient numbers of qualified heavy goods vehicle drivers from within Ireland and the wider EEA labour market,” Hyland said in a letter.
“These shortages exist despite sustained recruitment efforts, competitive remuneration packages and substantial investment in training and retention initiatives.”