Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy is as sincere as everybody else in the House about this issue, and I would like to tell him that we have a co-ordinated approach and we work within all the Departments that are relevant to training and upskilling. The Minister of State is involved in the co-ordination of the skills programme and the reorientation of the skills needs of workers. That is only a part of all that is happening. We have provided a facility for 2,200 redundant young people to allow them to fulfil their opportunities from an educational perspective. We are working with the Minister for Education and Science and with the Minister for Social and Family Affairs to provide new initiatives in the back to education scheme and the back to work scheme. There is a co-ordinated approach in dealing with these issues. We have short, medium and long-term resolutions to these problems.

We are also working on the task of sustaining people in employment by supporting industry. The methods as to how that can be done are being pursued with industry to ensure that the greatest outcomes will be afforded to people. We cannot have a situation where we have training for training's sake. It must be linked to where new opportunities will arise. On that basis, the skills strategy is being re-orientated to deal with the immediacy of what is happening. That is what we are doing with the convergence and the transferability of skills from people with existing skills and from others. We are working towards other programmes for graduates and others with different skill types. These are not necessarily the focus of FÁS.

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