Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Murchú for the question. The Action Plan for Apprenticeship 2021-2025 aims to ensure the apprenticeship system will contribute to meeting Ireland's skills and human capital requirements by delivering on a target of 10,000 apprenticeship registrations per annum by 2025. Among the 62 apprenticeships currently available at levels 5 to 10 of the national framework of qualifications, 25 are craft-related. More specifically, they include housing and retrofitting-related programmes such as electrical, plumbing, carpentry and joinery, plastering, painting and decorating and the recently-launched scaffolding apprenticeship.

Given the practical nature of off-the-job training for craft apprentices, the pandemic shutdown of on-site learning significantly impacted the ability of apprentices to access this training over the past two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. This has led to some apprentices taking longer to fully qualify.  However I am pleased to say that more than 7,500 of the affected apprentices have now progressed in their off-the-job training. This includes more than 600 final-year apprentices who have been fast-tracked to complete their qualification.

It is worth noting that overall craft apprenticeship qualification data show that numbers qualifying from these programmes rose over the five-year period from 2016 to 2021 from 1,222 to 1,798. Despite the fact that two of those years were affected by the pandemic, we saw a significant increase in the number of people qualifying from craft apprenticeships. Furthermore and encouragingly, annual intake to these programmes has been steadily increasing from a low of 650 in 2010. In 2021, a record of 8,607 new apprentices were registered, an almost 40% increase on the figures from 2019, in what we call the last "normal" pre-pandemic year, whatever that is. Of those registrations, 5,181 were on construction and electrical apprenticeships. As of January 2022, the latest full-month figures, there have been 376 construction-related registrations.

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