Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday marked the start of the European Year of Skills, which will run until 8 May 2024. It is an important European initiative that ties together many of the different efforts being made in Europe, including, of course, a kind of European green new deal. It will attempt to raise awareness by matching people's aspirations with the available job opportunities. That is significant for everybody's way of life. It will try to promote investment in high-skilled staff. It aims at a collaborative effort which brings together everyone, including workers, social partners and employers, to improve their skill sets for the green and digital economy. It also has a focus on promoting lifelong learning.

The European Commission stated, "Having a workforce with the skills that are in demand contributes to sustainable growth, leads to more innovation and improves companies' competitiveness." It also stated:

The European Year of Skills 2023 will help companies, in particular small and medium enterprises, to address skills shortages in the EU. It will promote a mindset of reskilling and upskilling, helping people to get the right skills for quality jobs.

Those are noble, aspirational and desirable sentiments and I do not think any sensible person in this House would find them disagreeable. As with other such EU initiatives, the drive to make them a reality will have to come from below. It will have to come from the member states themselves. It will be all about the buy-in from member states and how seriously they take it.

I can see from the Department’s website that a significant number of events are set to take place over the next year. These events are certainly a good opportunity for us to identify the skills that are needed. However, we must do more than that. When discussing the jobs of the future, the Minister mentioned we do not even know what kinds of jobs we will need. That is important. We will also have to establish why skills that have already been identified as in demand have not been brought on board quickly enough. We need to identify the shortcomings in the manner in which the current offerings are made. The delivery methods by which we train people, the way our workforce upskills and how we encourage the process of lifelong learning must be under constant evaluation and re-evaluation. Not only do we know that different types of jobs will come on board and certain skills may not be as needed in the future, we also need to understand why there have previously been shortcomings.

I will focus on the areas of apprenticeships, skills for the all-island economy and lifelong learning. With regard to apprenticeships, we must be frank that we have been failing. If the measure of success is reaching the target the Government has set for itself, it is difficult to reach any other conclusion. In 2016, the Government set a target of 9,000 annual apprenticeship registrations by 2020. In 2023, we still have not reached that target. A new target of 10,000 was set in 2020 but we have not even reached the old target.

The Government had set a target of 750 apprentices working in the public sector and semi-State bodies by 2025. The Minister, Deputy Harris, stated in March that there were approximately 320, which was well behind the target. Very slow progress has been made on the establishment of new types of apprenticeships, particularly those aligned with modern methods of construction, MMC, and green construction-related work. More work needs to be done in this area, specifically when we look at the total inadequacy of our housing supply. We need to be looking at that from a green perspective but also from a delivery perspective.

In 2018, the Government established the construction sector group to promote MMC and the skills it requires. The Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science has put out skills reports which identify many of these new apprenticeship types but they are very slow in coming on stream. Part of the work of the Minister and his Department must not simply identify those skills we already know we need but must identify the underlying reasons we are not making progress. We know there are far too few choosing apprenticeships relative to the time before the financial crisis. It is not hard to understand why. One report I came across by the Department spoke to that point and mentioned the precarity of work in the Irish construction sector. We have a history of a cycle of boom and bust and bogus self-employment, as has been discussed at length in this Chamber.

Earnings for craft and trade workers in Ireland are the most unequally distributed of any high-income EU country. This is driven by an intergenerational earnings gap that has widened more than in any other high-income EU country except Belgium over the past 15 years. The gap between the earnings of craft and trade workers under the age of 30 and the older workers in Ireland is now the widest of this group, and the median hourly rate for young workers is second lowest behind Italy when adjusted for living costs.

Significant numbers of our apprentices qualify and head off to places such as Australia and New Zealand. We see this pattern repeated in the likes of the healthcare system. That is easily identifiable and needs to be addressed.

I will move to the all-island economy and will focus on a particular example that was raised with me this week. There are students in Donegal who want to do apprenticeships in North West Regional College in Derry city, which is recognised for having excellent facilities. It is close by if you live in Donegal. However, there is a major barrier, which is the requirement for the employer to be registered and based in the North. Students with a local employer in Donegal who want to live in Bundoran, Buncrana or wherever else cannot use that employer if they are attending the college in Derry. It means they have to look to places like Galway and Cork for the educational part of their apprenticeship, which makes things more difficult for people with the cost of travel, difficulties finding affordable accommodation and not being able to commute as easily. I hope that, as part of the year of skills, we can examine ways to support the throughput of apprentices through the system with a greater all-island approach.

In respect of workforce upskilling and lifelong learning, there are a few things I would like to note. The Joint Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science has been hearing about the work that is being done to promote the teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM. We heard there has been difficulty in getting teachers and lecturers in that area. We also heard that one of the courses designed to try help people upskill in these areas was run by Coláiste Dhúlaigh in conjunction with Trinity College but that course has not run since 2019. If we want to encourage people to upskill, we need to ensure an availability of courses that are sufficiently promoted to let interested applicants know of their existence. Many industries remain paper-based and are badly in need of digitalisation.

In recent years, new part-time courses have been brought online and are designed to meet critical skills requirements in the digital area. These are courses which tend to teach a range of skills, such as computer programming through the package Python, database management systems like SQL, and statistical methods. The introduction of these courses was certainly welcome. It followed on from earlier efforts at identifying the skills that would be needed for the economy of the future. However, we should recognise there are significant dropout rates in those courses. There is a consensus among some that the difficulty and intensity of the courses for the people coming from unrelated backgrounds contributes to the high dropout rate. When these courses were first introduced, it was felt that it needed to be a case of sink or swim.

But, as noted in the Irish Examinerin December, one in 14 Irish households has never even used the Internet. If these courses are to try to bridge the gap and there are high dropout rates, then there should either be more basic intermediate courses or the duration of the course could be spread out over a longer time period. For many people working long hours and with families, an intense course that runs three to four nights a week for two years, with significant assignments and exams, can prove to be too much. A more relaxed approach could be needed.

I am running out of time and my colleague, Deputy Ruairí Ó Murchú, wants to contribute. I just want to mention one proposal that has been attracting a lot of attention. That is the idea of a job guarantee scheme, where the State acts as a kind of employer of last resort. The European youth guarantee scheme in some ways offers a model for this. This was a commitment by member states to ensure that all young people under the age of 30 receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, an apprenticeship or a traineeship within a period of four months of them becoming unemployed or leaving education. That is a very interesting and exciting concept but it is not something we have always lived up to. This is something we should look at, given the budget surpluses of €65 billion by 2025, and this being the European Year of Skills. We see the difficulties a lot of young people have. They want to stay in the country and they cannot for a variety of reasons such as the cost of housing and other costs. This is an extremely good model and it is something on which we should focus.

See this speech in context