We need to look at the background to all of this, namely, the problem of unemployment. Serious efforts must be made to sustain and create jobs. We must examine how that can be done. Barriers to job creation must be removed. Many of our young graduates are booking their tickets to leave the country. Unfortunately, this country again faces the famous brain drain we witnessed in the 1980s. It seems such a waste. Services must be provided to encourage them to stay. We must give them the opportunity to stay in productive environments where their skills will not be lost. It is all very well to put in place training or retraining programmes but if one is a chef, does one want to be retrained as a architect? Some of the offers made to people are ridiculous and do not make sense. There must be co-ordination between the retraining programmes and the opportunities that might exist for people in the workplace at a later stage.

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