This is an important debate. A high proportion, in excess of 60%, of our young people go to third level. It is good that people are becoming highly qualified and are able to get quality jobs. However, there is a skills shortage and an imbalance. There is a shortage of people with construction skills and a shortage of people undertaking those apprenticeships. That was not addressed during the Celtic tiger, even though there was a building boom, and it was certainly not done during the crash. There is a shortage of electricians, plumbers, plasterers, carpenters and technicians for retrofitting and heat pumps, etc. Laois County Council has difficulty even getting people to service heat pumps and finding people to repair them because the skills are not there. We also need apprenticeships in the motor trade. There is, in Laois, a chronic shortage of mechanics, technicians and crash repair panel beaters, along with the shortages across the county in the building trades. We need apprenticeships. There need to be apprenticeships across a wide range of areas. I welcome the fact that the Government has expanded the programme. There are over 80 apprenticeships at the moment. We need to be promoting that in accounting, IT, manufacturing, logistics and so on. Apprenticeships offer an alternative route. We need to further develop apprenticeships through the Laois and Offaly Education and Training Board. It is doing excellent work in Mount Lucas. Other training centres in Laois and Offaly need to be used for that. Apprentices have an advantage because they are earning and training. That is better than being in a third level college in a lot of ways. They have on-the-job and real-life experience, which is hugely important. They also have progression to secure employment and the exceptionally high rate of employment after apprenticeships shows that. They also have freedom in later life because they have a transferable a skill. They can progress to greater things. For example, carpenters can move on to become clerks of works. I acknowledge the expansion in the range of apprenticeships. We should be actively promoting that. An idea was put forward over the weekend by an economist who suggested that when we are building an extension to a school, the pupils of the school should be able to visit it and interact with the workers and the project to give them a taste of what it is like and encourage them. There is exploitation of apprentices by a small number of employers. They use them as a means of cheap labour by paying less than the minimum wage. Instead of apprenticeships being used as an opportunity for learning and training, they are being used for that. The apprentices are being let go in their third or fourth years. It is important that apprentices have the right to be represented, like all other workers, by a trade union. We do not have the right to collective bargaining here and we need it, particularly for apprentices. They need to be within the minimum wage framework and the Redundancy Payments Act.

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