John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I commend Deputy Thomas Byrne for bringing this motion forward. There is a real passion on this side of the House for apprenticeships. I raised it when I was first elected in 2014 at a time when the Troika was running the country and I thought there were Ministers who would not have had an awful lot to do and apprenticeships was an obvious area on which to expend some serious energy to build programmes. We need as a society to develop a much stronger philosophy around apprenticeships. There was a survey based on postal addresses and in the Dublin 6 area 99% of those who did leaving certificate went to college. I cannot believe that 99% of them wanted to go to college. Surely there were some in that number who would have liked to have had different options but they are simply not there.

The male to female disparity has been mentioned: there are 14,500 males in apprenticeships, and 319 females. In Northern Ireland there were 6,000 apprentices last year and of them 34% were women. In Britain, of 369,000 apprentices, 54% were women. In Denmark, 45% of those who have come through apprenticeship programmes are women. Apprenticeship programmes are not just for the 17 to 20 year olds. A person can connect into one at any time in their working life by retraining, re-education and re-skilling.

I am not knocking the Government but it is very slow. There are many third level education programmes - we need to be courageous enough to say this - that qualify students for nothing. There is an overemphasis on college education. Students who have come through a handful of college programmes say they were educated for nothing. Those who had an apprenticeship and were forced to emigrate in bad times got a job within 24 or 48 hours.

Local authorities would be a good place to start. Deputy Byrne mentioned the parks departments. I would add library departments too and all the functions that could be carried out in local authorities. Imagine if we ran sports apprenticeships in this country: every school that has a physical education, PE, teacher could have a satellite of three or four PE instructors who have come through an apprenticeship programme supporting them. Every sports club, regardless of code, could have a range of apprenticeship supports training kids on the pitches because sports clubs of every code are having difficulty attracting volunteers. Maybe today will spark the start of a serious conversation where we change philosophy and we do not denigrate college but say that there are alternatives. When the apprenticeship commission was set up in the UK its objective was simple, that every parent "might" consider the idea of an apprenticeship for their child. We are nowhere near that.

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