Ms Patricia King:

I will deal with the question relating to education. One of the key components of attempting to put in place a short-time work agreement, for instance, is training. The take-up of training will be low if people believe that it will mean lower income for them. The whole idea of having a comprehensive short-time working agreement is that people can train and their income will be covered under the agreement. Indeed, in spring the OECD recommended that Ireland should introduce a statutory training leave for workers. If a model is to be developed whereby workers will be reskilled either because of a diversification route a company is going to pursue and take up or in order to retrain and reskill for alternative employment while still connected with the workplace, we will have to ensure it is opportune for people to take it up and that they feel they can do so in the context of their income. At the moment, we are not in discussions on that issue. We should be in those discussions and much further along in the development of that model. The new Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science has an opportunity to focus on all of this. It is currently having a very good look at the issue through a review process, for instance, on the whole area of apprenticeship training and so on. As members are aware, apprenticeships have expanded far beyond the traditional craft worker and construction routes. There are all sorts of other apprenticeships available, but they have not been developed to the level they ought to be developed. Some of the structures are in place to allow us to develop a proper upskilling and retraining programme but those discussions should be much more advanced than they actually are. One of the key things I hope the committee will recommend is that those discussions should happen and should be concluded fairly soon.