What we look for
- Hands-on work with pigs — reading the animal, spotting a sick or off-feed pig early, handling and moving stock calmly without stress or injury.
- Breeding and farrowing: heat detection, service and AI, sow condition through gestation, supervising farrowing, assisting difficult births, cross-fostering and getting piglets onto colostrum.
- Biosecurity as the unit runs it — shower-in/shower-out, downtime between units, all-in/all-out.
- Administering medicines and vaccines under direction, keeping accurate treatment and withdrawal records, and reporting anything notifiable.
- The daily routine: feed and water systems, ventilation and temperature checks, washing and disinfecting pens between batches, slurry handling, weighing and drafting.
Questions you'll be asked
These are the questions the application form asks. You do not need to answer yes to every one — they tell us where your experience actually sits.
- How many years you have worked with pigs on a commercial farm
- The largest unit you have worked on, in sows or pigs
- Which stages you have worked in — service/dry sow, farrowing, weaner/nursery, finishing
- Whether you have worked in a farrowing house, assisting sows through birth and caring for newborn piglets
- Whether you can carry out heat detection and artificial insemination
- Whether you have given vaccines or medicines to pigs and recorded them
- Which machinery you can operate
Qualifications that help
None of these is essential, and a qualification from any country counts.
- An agricultural or animal husbandry qualification from any country — SENAR, ITI, TESDA NC II Animal Production or a national equivalent
- An artificial insemination (AI) certificate
- An animal welfare or animal transport certificate
- A tractor or telehandler licence
- Safe Pass or equivalent farm safety training
We assess English at around CEFR A2 for this role — enough to follow instructions and raise a problem with the person you work for. That is our own standard, not an Irish legal requirement; there is no English test in the permit rules for this job.
Pay and the work permit
Pig farm assistant roles sit on the standard General Employment Permit band — €36,605 a year, based on a 39-hour week at €18.05 an hour. The hourly rate is what DETE checks, so a 40-hour contract needs €37,544 rather than €36,605. The National Minimum Wage of €14.15 an hour applies to all hours worked.
This role is eligible for a General Employment Permit: it is carved out of DETE's ineligible occupations list by name. The job normally has to pass a 28-day Labour Market Needs Test — the employer runs that, advertising the role with JobsIreland/EURES and on a second jobs platform for 28 unbroken days. Either you or the employer can be named as the applicant on the permit itself; on our placements it is the employer. Either way the cost is not yours to carry: under section 55 of the Employment Permits Act 2024 an employer cannot take the permit fee, recruitment costs, or travel money they have already paid you out of your wages, or ask you to pay any of it back. Doing that is a criminal offence.
Pig farm assistant had a quota of 214 permits from 2 September 2024 under S.I. 444/2024. The Schedule 5 that S.I. 213/2026 substituted on 13 May 2026 has no row for the role, so the Regulations no longer cap it. DETE has published no notice about the role either way as at 24 September 2026, so we confirm the current position with DETE before an employer advertises.
How long it takes
From an employer offering the job to you starting work, in our experience the realistic timeline is 6 to 8 months if you need an entry visa — the Philippines, for example. From a country that does not need an entry visa, such as Brazil, allow about 4 to 5 months. That covers the 28-day Labour Market Needs Test, DETE permit processing, the visa and travel. DETE processes applications in date order and publishes its current dates; we do not quote a figure that could be out of date by the time you read it.
If you are already living in Ireland on a permit, the position is different — tell us on the form and we will explain where you stand.
Apply
The application takes about ten minutes. You will be asked about your experience, and you can upload a CV and record a short voice clip so we can put you forward properly.