Bobby Aylward (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Ireland has long been known as the island of saints and scholars but we are also a very skilled nation when it comes to working with our hands. Tens of thousands of tradesmen and tradeswomen in this country entered their chosen industry at a young age and learned it from the ground up, as apprentices. It is fair to say that our economy and citizens continue to benefit from the skills of such hardworking men and women. However, the current Fine Gael-led Administration has been extremely tardy in addressing the need to develop and advance the apprenticeship sector and take advantage of the largely untapped potential of our very skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen.

Getting to grips with the ongoing housing crisis in this country, for example, urgently requires more skilled workers to ramp up the construction of units and put bricks and mortar on the ground. Earlier this year, the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, predicted that 3,840 construction related apprentices will be required by 2020. Subsequent to this, the Government took the decision not to adopt and roll out the successfully piloted shared apprenticeship scheme carried out by SOLAS in partnership with CIF and the Waterford and Wexford Education and Training Board. The pilot project for enabling builders to share apprenticeships was effectively abandoned, with no replacement to date. Despite the known success of this model in boosting apprenticeship numbers in Britain, the Government took the decision not to extend the pilot initiative to test the viability of the same scheme here. It is even more difficult to understand the reasoning behind this decision when one considers that Ireland is lagging far behind Britain and many EU countries in the scale and diversity of apprenticeships currently offered. Of the 1,500 registrations targeted by Government for new business led apprenticeships in 2018, only 410 starts, which is 27% of the target, had taken place by 30 September, while the 2017 target was missed by 58%. Young people need to be given a clearer avenue and better opportunities to take up work in the construction sector so that we are better able to secure the scale of workforce required to build affordable homes across Ireland.

There is a long-standing emphasis placed on the critical importance of apprenticeships and vocational education and training in Europe and worldwide. Traditionally, the focus has been on craft apprenticeships in Ireland but until recently little has been done to expand the range of career enhancing apprenticeships that can be provided. The national apprenticeship system is chronically underdeveloped and requires the Government to be aggressively proactive in getting additional apprenticeship occupations established that are of a high quality and are built to last. The Fianna Fáil motion before the House this afternoon seeks to achieve this.

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