Mr. Bryan O'Mahony:

I would stay away from a loans system. We want these people to built houses to benefit the community. This is a community good they are doing. This is helping the infrastructure of society. Having a loans system is not that way to go about it because then people will still have debt at the end of the day. Subsidies or grants should be in place to allow people to do an apprenticeship. We listen to the voices of apprenticeship voices when they come from the education cycle because they are the people we represent. They are very lost when they come onto a campus. They are on their own in completely different buildings sometimes. They do not know where the student services offices are and they never meet people from the students union to get their voices heard that way. There is two parts to the education system and they are not treated as regular students when they are in the educational cycle. They are kind of left on their own without supports behind them. They have no voice then because they do not know what the student union is since they have never experienced it. We have seen cycles where people have tried to look for union support and sometimes they have got a lash-back from their employer about it. There is definitely a cultural aspect that needs to change to ensure those doing apprenticeships feel like they can have their voices heard as part of the conversation. When we are looking at changing systems, we cannot have a conversation about somebody without them being involved in that conversation about change.