Mr. Michael Fitzgerald:

From our experience with apprenticeships, we reap what we sow. We make a great deal of effort to promote our apprenticeships. We do this through our apprentices themselves, who are advocates to their peers and act as a bridge to parents, teachers and schools. We have a very active campaign of school visits with 55 visits to different schools in 24 counties last year. Of those schools, 21 were DEIS schools. We also have a very significant programme of work with third level partners promoting science in DEIS schools, where people come in for a day and do technical skills. The plan would be that they would then choose STEM subjects in secondary school to give them an option of becoming an apprentice. We also do an ESB Science Blast programme, which reaches 20,000 school children at primary level every year. The plan there is to make science attractive and fun and to help people to break down whatever perceived barriers they may see around practical skills. It gives students the option to pick the right subjects so they can go on to be apprentices or in our case, to go on to be engineers from apprenticeships. There is quite a bit of work involved but it is tremendously rewarding. For us, apprenticeships have been the source of very highly skilled young people coming into our business, staying in our business and eventually running our business.