Dr. Peter Rigney:

Nobody from the trade union movement will ever say they have been involved enough. We are involved and have two members on the national Apprenticeship Council which operates within SOLAS.

On having a CAO type system, the strength of the apprenticeship system is that there can be no under-filling because it requires an employer to say, "I want a person." In theory, if the national need for stonemasons is 20 per year, there must be 20 stonemason contractors who will each say they want somebody. Therefore, we would not favour such a system. There has to be an interface meeting between the employer and the young person at which the employer can interview the young person and estimate that he or she is suitable. To combat apprenticeships being held by families, there are and have been bursaries for women apprentices, for example, for quite some time in FÁS. However, everyone agrees they have not been greatly successful. I would say the answer is "No" to CAO involvement because it would anonymise the process. I want to be careful in the light of the Chairman's comments, but if we consider the position on quotas, the president of the Irish Universities Association has said some universities game the system by slicing and dicing their courses into small segments to inflate the courses. The CAO system is basically an auction.

The strength of the apprenticeship model is that there is a contract between the employer and the young person. I rarely quote an employer, but one of the IBEC representatives on the apprenticeship committee said that for this system to work, it must be sold to the mammies of Ireland in the context of young people in fifth year asking in October, November or December what they are going to do in terms of pursuing a career. In my first year in college I recall that the first thing I was told was that I was not in school any more, that the lecturers did not care if we did not turn up to lectures or if we did not do our essays because we simply would not pass our examinations, that we were adults and responsible for our own learning. I was okay with that, but others were not and fell through the system. However, if somebody turns up for work on a Monday and is told that he or she is in the job, that these are the tasks they have to do, that he or she will be paid on Friday and that three or six months into his or her apprenticeship he or she will go to an educational and training board training centre or an institute of technology, he or she, first and foremost, will regard himself or herself as being an employee of the company, subject to the normal requirements of company life and if a reasonable request is made of them to perform some task, he or she will do it.