Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It goes without saying that students, and apprentices in particular, are impacted by the cost-of-living crisis. Before the recent hike in home heating oil and electricity, there was the issue of rents, which are a huge cost that are a bane to students and their families. As many have mentioned, we are still dealing with a backlog in apprenticeships. It is unfair that somebody could sign up for a four-year apprenticeship that ends up being five or six years. That has a huge economic and wider impact on the apprentices and their families. These are issues we need to get to grips with. It is as simple as that.

I welcome that we are in a much different world with regard to roadmaps to employment and further education. I welcome the likes of the advanced manufacturing training centre of excellence in Xerox Technology Park in Dundalk, with which the Louth and Meath Education and Training Board was highly involved. We need to deal with industry from the point of view of providing the added training that will be required. We also need to make sure we do the work in relation to apprenticeships and PLCs and look at people who find it difficult to get into that educational framework. I have spoken to the Minister about projects in the Redeemer Family Resource Centre where certain modules were provided in a setting people might have been more comfortable with, before continuing on to Dundalk Institute of Technology, DKIT, or so on. We have a huge amount of work to do in dealing with those sorts of issues.

Regarding climate change and retrofitting, we all welcome the courses that are required but we also need to look at our base apprenticeships, like plumbing and such, and ensure those skills are included within the training framework. That is a necessity. We are back to the same conversation many of us are having about workforce planning. I met lately with people from the nursing and midwifery course in DKIT and I spoke about the possibilities for expansion, which would require capital investment in space and staffing. There needs to be a further audit of what is necessary. We all know the work that needs to be done in research and development. Many of us will have been contacted by the Institute of Physics in Ireland about these issues. We need more of that workforce planning and an audit of the skill sets required in order to ensure we have the training frameworks required for that throughput of people.

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