Ms Marie Bourke:

A number of years ago we did some research with the expert group on future skills needs in the green economy and identified some of the skills that will be needed for retrofitting, including training up apprentices whose numbers had been really low at the time, looking at building information modelling systems and looking at installation of windmills on land and sea and their maintenance because we did not have the skills at the time. There were a number of recommendations in that report that the Department of Education and Skills took up with regard to apprenticeship training and traineeships and, more particularly, looking to see whether we needed specific graduate programmes in some of these areas of renewable energy. The decision was that the graduate students need to come through the core programmes and do an add-on module as they specialise in these particular areas.