Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Yes; I am sharing with Deputy Barry. I want to tell the Minister of State a little story which sums up what we need to do if we want to encourage people to get back into apprenticeships. I was at the Select Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach dealing with the Finance Bill so I have not heard all the debate but I am sure other speakers have said that there are not many issues more important than dramatically increasing the number of apprentices. Many of the hopes we have of solving the housing crisis in particular critically depend on us increasing the number of people taking up apprenticeships in the trades in a dramatic way. Also, in terms of our hopes for infrastructural development, we have to get large numbers of young people taking up apprenticeships again.

The story I am about to relate sums up the problem. I met a young man, whose name I will not mention, at a protest involving film workers on precarious employment in the film industry. It was interesting, and I will talk more about this in the finance committee in a while, that a bit of a hatchet job was done by RTÉ on those protesting workers last Thursday, which was shameful and a gross misrepresentation of the issues affecting workers trying to find a career for themselves in an industry like film, where many of them would be tradespeople and which depends heavily on tradespeople. The day after that protest, and I would like the producers of "Prime Time" to take this on board in terms of the way they misrepresented some of the issues involved, an apprentice painter who was participating in it rang me. He has served his entire apprenticeship while living in emergency homeless accommodation. I spent the next few days, thankfully successfully, pleading with Dublin City Council to assist him with his housing assistance payment, HAP, because he was threatened with eviction by his landlord. In fairness to Brendan Kenny, we succeeded in sorting it out, but that is what he has had to put up with for four years as an apprentice.

His case brings into focus two very important issues. Why do we have difficulty getting people to enter the trades? I will tell the Minister of State the reason. It is because precarious employment for the trades is rampant. Many people have left the trades and do not want to go back into them. Many of those who worked on construction are driving taxis now and would not dream of returning to construction or other trades because of the precarity of much of the work and bogus self-employment, which means they cannot get mortgages, they cannot be guaranteed to pay their rents and so on. Unless we deal with that side of it, there will not be the encouragement necessary for people to go back into the trades.

In areas like film, construction and many other areas where we are talking about apprenticeships, people need to have some prospect that they will have some kind of employment security, half decent conditions of employment, half decent pay and so on if they are to enter the trades. I also believe, given that type of situation, that we need to consider increasing the income apprentices earn while they are apprentices to encourage them to take up apprenticeships in the first place because many of them will not do it for that reason.

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