Mr. Andrew Brownlee:

On the waiting lists, we have to be conscious that it is only from last month that ETBs and higher education institutions have been allowed to return to full on-site capacity. There is a major emergency plan and I agree with the Deputy that it is an emergency. Capacity was an issue before all of this started but it is many times worse now. The emergency plan involves increasing the instructor base significantly and the Deputy will see that there is an ongoing campaign to recruit 100 additional staff into ETBs in the coming months. We have moved the entire delivery model for phase 2 of off-the-job training from three intakes per year to two, which increases capacity by 50%. Some €20 million of capital investment has been made to expand workshop capacity across both further education and higher education.

The key point is that we are back on-site. For the first nine months of the first 12 months of Covid, the workshops were closed and we could not run the training.

For the period up to September, they were operating at approximately 50% capacity, but they are ramped up now. We are turning a corner, in that the waiting list decreased from 11,800 at the end of July to 9,797 at the end of September. That happened because we have been able to get people back in training. We believe a corner is turned but there will be no let-up. We completely accept that we are in an emergency situation.