A US Congressman has introduced two Bills into the House of Representatives in an effort to save a visa programme for Northern Ireland and the Border counties.
New York Congressman, Mr Jim Walsh, who gives his name to the Walsh Visa Programme, has taken the unusual step of introducing two Bills to double his chances of getting one of them passed before the programme runs out on September 30th.
Congressman Walsh said he was "in a hurry" but was confident that one of the pieces of legislation would be passed by September 30th, even though Congress shuts down for August.
The programme, introduced in the wake of the Good Friday agreement, allows hundreds of trainees from Northern Ireland and the Border counties to work in the US for up to three years.
Congressman Walsh warned earlier this year that the programme could run out unless it passed through Congress on time and received more support from the Northern Ireland Department of Education and Learning.
"We have a Plan A and a Plan B to pass the programme through Congress and, as it stands at the moment, there are two Bills," he said. "It's a tactic that allows us to pursue both and whichever works out best, we'll take that road."
This week, the House of Representatives voted in favour of one of the Bills, which had been attached to the Foreign Operations Reauthorisation Bill, a much larger piece of legislation.
However, Congressman Walsh said a second Bill, due to come before the House Judiciary Committee next Wednesday, had a better chance of being passed by the deadline because it will not be attached to a larger piece of legislation.
He said that he was searching for a senator to introduce an identical Bill in the Senate.
"If the House and Senate bills are identical, it means that they do not have to go before a House of Representatives-Senate conference for further discussion once they are voted in. They can go straight to the President for signing," he said.
Congressman Walsh said his office had "reached out" to Republican Senator Mitch O'Connell to sponsor the Senate Bill.
Earlier this year, Congressman Walsh sharply criticised bureaucrats in the Northern Ireland Department of Education and Learning for failing to fully support the visa programme, which is heavily under-subscribed.
At the time, he praised the support of the Irish Government and Northern Ireland politicians but said that some high-level bureaucrats in Northern Ireland were not giving the programme enough support because they wanted only well-paying jobs for participants.
"The point of the programme was to help remove the large wells of unemployment that were feeding into the sectarian hatred," he said.