Dr. Adele Bergin:

I will just expand a little on what Professor McMahon has said. There is some literature in an Irish context on the impact of immigration. It is a little bit older now. A lot of it was done in the ESRI. As Professor McMahon said, one of the things about Ireland's immigration story is that the people who come to the country tend to be younger and they also tend to be better educated on average than natives. They are more likely to be employed and less likely to be in receipt of welfare payments and that kind of thing. On average they are, in that sense, contributing to the economy. We have done work, and work has been done in the past, looking at things like the Celtic tiger era towards the end of the late 1990s where Ireland was running out of workers to keep everything going. Initially a lot of Irish people came back and then it was migrants who were there to fill the labour demand. There is some literature there covering a lot of the 2000s. I am just not aware of anything more recent but we are really happy to hand over anything on that.

On the apprenticeships, when we consider the collapse in construction after the financial crisis, one of the things that happened then was a collapse in the further education and training system and the courses that were aimed at construction and all the relevant occupations around that. The further education and training sector is one of the more flexible components where we can ramp up. It takes time but we can start producing more from that. It is not just about increasing courses, however. It is also about saying to young people this is a viable option. Offering career guidance and so on is relevant there as well.