Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We desperately need more apprentices and we need to make apprenticeships and trades attractive to people in order to address the problems that our society is facing at the moment. Across the board, the lack of skills necessary to solve big social problems is enormous. Most obviously, there is a desperate need for qualified tradespeople, and that means apprentices, to build the houses we need and to refurbish vacant and derelict properties in order to solve the housing crisis. We also need them in the context of climate change to retrofit homes. Hundreds of thousands of homes need to be retrofitted but we do not have enough skilled people to do this work. We also need them to build new schools.

There are so many other areas where we are desperately in need of talent but we have shortages. Hundreds of thousands of people were working in construction during the Celtic tiger period. However, because of the disastrous approach taken to housing in this country, whereby we let developers, speculators and banks dictate housing development, the housing sector collapsed, along with the rest of the economy and people fled out of construction sector and did not ever want to go back to it. A lot of them are now working as taxi drivers and so on because they did not want to go back into construction. The precariousness and lack of security in many of these areas are critical. In that context, we need a State construction company and our local authorities should be taking on apprentices to train in the areas we need. In this way, the local authorities will have the capacity to build, refurbish and do all of the other things local authorities do in terms of infrastructure.

Lip service is now being paid to the need for apprentices and while some improvements have been made in terms of expanding the number of apprenticeship places, huge problems remain. Many apprentices are suffering extreme economic hardship. Many of them are older, with families, mortgages and other financial obligations. They have transport costs and have to pay €1,000 in fees. Those fees should be scrapped immediately. When they are going to college they do not have access to SUSI grants. They should have the same supports when they are in college as everybody else. Apprentices must also be given college places near where they live. If they are working and paying rent in Dublin but given a college place in Donegal, orvice versa, they may have to get digs and pay for transport to get there. Some apprentices may be getting the benefit of sectoral agreements so their pay is not too bad, but others are not. Mechanics, for example, are particularly poorly paid as apprentices because the sectoral agreements do not really work for them. In many parts of the country apprentices are on poverty wages. They are working for less than the minimum wage and do not have the supports necessary to carry them through. We need to provide those supports. We need to ensure that their college places are near where they live, get rid of fees and give SUSI supports to apprentices.

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