Mr. Padraig Boland:

On training and the skills base, we have been engaging with Bord na Móna workers via workshop information and advice clinics. We started these last February when news of the strategy to 2028 first broke. Those workshops and clinics are ongoing. Th process has been ratcheted up a bit. This week, for example, the education and training boards, ETBs, are in Mount Dillion. These are the Galway-Roscommon ETB, the Laois-Offaly ETB and the Longford-Westmeath ETB, along with our colleagues from Athlone Institute of Technology and the regional skills forum. The ETBs are taking the lead in each case. We have been advising people broadly and we are trying to get engagement.

We are cognisant that many of these workers have been out of an education or training setting for a long time. We need to help them identify the skills they may have gained over the years. Many may have got jobs with Bord na Móna straight from school. While thinking they had jobs for life, they now have this foisted upon them. I am thinking in particular of last Friday when we happened to be in Blackwater when, unfortunately, the news broke about Shannonbridge. These workers have had to deal with the shock element. We have engaged experts in career guidance. We are looking to perform skills audits of those workers and carry out a training needs analysis for how to develop career pathways. These are new, bespoke programmes and are additional to those accommodating the 11,000 learners we have in the further education and training sector in Laois and Offaly. These Bord na Móna workers are not the 1,000 people we have already moved directly into employment from our other employment engagement programmes in the last year in Laois and Offaly. This is in addition to that.

Two programmes are funded by SOLAS nationally. The Skills to Advance programme is primarily focused on upskilling employees who are already in a workforce. The other programme involves traineeships that can be developed. It is based on the apprenticeship model, alternance training and work placement. It is a flexible approach to upskilling people. This can be focused at employed and unemployed people.

It is a little premature to answer the Senator's question without the skills audit being completed. We have been looking for this for a long time. It started with the workers in Mount Dillion on Monday. All of the ETBs have had staff in Mount Dillion for the week. They will then move to Blackwater on Monday next and we will start there. When we have the skills audit we will marry it with a study of the skills gaps - as undertaken by Mr. John Costello and the regional skills forum - and then work with the rest of the transition team. There will be bespoke training programmes.