Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the plans to ensure apprenticeships are respected. As someone who comes from a working-class background, I know many who work in the trades. There has been a rush away from trades and apprenticeships, and this was really exacerbated by the recession. When the economy collapsed, half a million people left the country. Many of them were tradespeople who never come back. The system was badly damaged then. We currently have 6,928 apprentices waiting to complete their off-the-job training. This is one-third of all apprentices. Unlike other students who have seen their studies disrupted, apprentices cannot advance and complete their training without the off-the-job training process. Many apprenticeships have been working through the lockdown and have not been told anything about when their off-site education will resume. They hope they will make up for lost time to qualify for their trades. They face a serious issue. It needs to be addressed.

The second issue I would like to raise with the Minister concerns funding for the student union in TU Dublin following the amalgamation. The union's funding has been severely cut. The tag lines of its emails are interesting and quite shocking. It states its student adviser staff has unfortunately been reduced to four due to funding cuts by TU Dublin. It states it will get back to me about my query as soon as it can but that, due to the funding cuts, it may take longer to do so. Surely it should not be the case in the middle of a pandemic that a union doing its absolute best to deal with the myriad problems students are facing is having such cuts imposed on it, resulting in the loss of a critical number of staff.

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