Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will try to keep it general. On tradespeople and apprenticeships, we will need a huge number of tradespeople if we are serious about the move towards building, with Rebuilding Ireland, and retrofitting homes. I worry about the lack of tradespeople. I spoke to a builder recently who informed me that tradespeople are becoming known as "grey sites" because they all have grey hair. I recently visited a school, and not one of the children put up their hand when I asked who wanted to be a tradesperson. We need to do some serious work on this. We need to make apprenticeships more attractive. I wish I had been told to marry a tradesman when I was in school because tradespeople are the ones who keep everything on the road.

I do not know whether we need to issue a PR statement or something around the importance of tradesmen. They are literally keeping everything we do together, whether it is buildings, transport or whatever. Where would we be without tradesmen? I do not know whether they are valued as much as they ought to be and I think we need to do something around that. We lost a good few tradespeople in the previous recession. Some of them are in Australia or Canada or such places. It may be time to consider calling them back, as was done for nurses and doctors. We will have a shortage of tradespeople to do the work we want done. We want to get houses built and retrofitted. I ask the Tánaiste to think about that and consider what can be done. The apprenticeship model must include time in college so that even people from rural areas who want to become a tradesperson get time experiencing college life and living away from home and that kind of thing. The job itself has changed in many ways. I am going to move away from apprenticeships and the importance of tradesmen. I should say tradespeople. I have female friends who are carpenters and so on but I was reared saying tradesmen. However, we have to consider tradespeople if we are serious about what we want to do.

An issue I wish to raise with the Tánaiste relates to the public realm and how space is shared, particularly in the context of the food and hospitality sector. There is a need for local authorities to create outdoor spaces, not necessarily outdoor dining but outdoor seating and other outdoor spaces such that if a person wishes to sit down and eat something, whether he or she bought it from a restaurant with seating or a restaurant without seating or whatever, he or she can do so. We really need to consider the public realm. I think that will not be done properly unless there are urban designers or urban architects in local authorities. I mean no offence to road engineers and technicians and quantity surveyors. They are brilliant at their jobs but this task is not part of their profession. We really need to look at that issue because we want to become like the rest of Europe, where it is normal for villages and towns to have beautiful, safe and aesthetically pleasing places to hang out. We get the same amount of rainfall as Copenhagen and Amsterdam. People speak about the weather a lot but it is not as bad as many people think. We need to consider that. It will not work if we do not get proper urban designers. We cannot leave it on the shoulders of people who have been trained as road engineers. That is really important if we want to get outdoor everything right, which we do because, as a nation, we went outdoors and realised it is bloody amazing. It is really important to do that.