Mr. Andrew Brownlee:

There were two questions. With Housing for All, the imperative is to support the delivery of 33,000 houses per annum. The emergency measures we talked about in terms of the apprenticeship pipeline once we have dealt with the waiting list problem should give us an increase in capacity of around 50%, which in the medium term will be a platform to deliver on that. It is not just about apprenticeships, there is a need to ramp up the non-apprenticeship courses. There is a model to follow with the development of the Mount Lucas National Construction Training Centre, which has started to work in partnership with the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, and others to develop levels 4 and 5 construction courses to get people into the labour force.

Retrofitting is a big challenge. It was mentioned that Waterford-Wexford had the first retrofitting centre of excellence. There is now one in Laois-Offaly and there are plans for centres in Sligo, Limerick and Cork.

We have two fully operational and the rest will be on-stream by quarter 1 of next year.

There is still not significant demand from industry for the courses that are being offered in those facilities. There is a job of work there to stimulate industry interest and demand. Contracts may still be coming to them a little to easily. We need to find a way to get the focus on what they will need to meet the skills needs of tomorrow.

On the further education and training to higher education transitions question, I think the Deputy is right that it is ad hocat present. It depends on college-to-college links. One in five of the technological higher education sector intake still comes from further education. There are, therefore, strong transitions in place. However, we need to look at a more universal system, probably theme by theme. Perhaps we should start with nursing and then perhaps information technology or initial teacher education, chunk that off and put in place a system where a student who gets a level 5 pre-nursing qualification will know that he or she will have direct access to an Irish higher educational institution to do the degree. I think it should go further. There is real potential for one-plus-two and two-plus-two models where students start their degree in a further education institution. That is a model for which we can borrow and learn from jurisdictions not too far from here.