Apprenticeships: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-10 ============================================================ Dee Ryan (FF), Nominated by the Taoiseach Curaim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I thank her for coming in to the Chamber today and for taking the time to listen and engage with us on this really important topic. I commend the work being done in the Department and the work she has been leading on in the area of apprenticeships since her appointment. As a parent and the Fianna Fáil spokesperson in the Seanad on further and higher education and skills, I am very interested in this area. It has been a thrill and a real eye-opener to learn over the past year, in discussions at the Oireachtas education committee, about the very many areas that are open to young people now through the Earn and Learn model. I commend the Minister of State and her colleagues in the Department on increasing from 58 to 78, in just a short number of years, the number of different courses and qualifications available through the model across the country. All of these are being delivered in partnership with SOLAS and the ETBs. On Saturday last I attended a career fair at my child's secondary school, Castletroy College in Limerick city. There are almost 1,500 students in the school and the careers fair was organised by the parents council. We invited local employers to come to the school, put up a stand and talk to the children in senior cycle - fourth, fifth and sixth year - about the potential roles that might be open to them when they finish school or when they are thinking about what courses they should apply for. We ran a number of panels, one of which was the Earn and Learn panel and I was delighted that there was great interest in it and a huge attendance. We had past pupils on the panel, including Fionn McInerney Garry, who is a third year apprentice electrician. He came to the school in his Snickers workwear and spoke to the children and parents about what his role involves and about his journey so far. We also had an apprentice auctioneer, James Carney from Rooney's Auctioneers in Limerick. We had a representative from Johnson and Johnson, which is a huge employer in Castletroy, with over 2,000 people going in and out of its manufacturing facility every day. A dedicated member of the company's management team is responsible for recruiting apprentices and promoting its apprenticeship programmes. There are four different engineering programmes that can be done via apprenticeship in Johnson and Johnson, with two intakes per annum of school leavers from secondary schools in the Limerick area. We also had one of the enterprise liaison managers, Ms Eimear Brophy, from the Limerick and Clare ETB on the panel. It was a really interesting discussion. We pulled the chairs into a semi-circle, parents and students asked lots of questions and it was so informative. I learned a huge amount. I was there as a parent and it was great to be looking at it from the other side of the desk. We have been examining it from the State's perspective and thinking about how the programmes are run, funding within the Department and guidance for employers on pay for apprentices. We have been thinking and learning, rightly, about all the issues around off-the-job placements and the efforts being made to match the apprentices to locations that are close to their homes to help them manage the challenges around accommodation, the cost of equipment and all those issues. To hear it from the other side, for the first time, was an eye-opener. There is great excitement from the employers' perspective about the value of these programmes. They want to develop relationships with employees. They bring people in at the age of 18, support them to learn on the job and get their qualifications, and then, later in their careers, perhaps they will take the next step to management level, having really got to know the company over the course of their first qualification. The students wanted to know about applying for different roles. They were surprised to hear that as an apprentice electrician, for example, you can move employer during your time in training. There are advertisements and opportunities for second- and third-year apprentices. In that way, you can broaden your experience in different areas. You might spend a couple of years in residential home-building before going into an industrial setting and specialising in something else. In Limerick, for example, huge work is ongoing at the Eli Lilly plant at the moment. Fionn McInerney Garry, who was with us, told us that he moved from the area of home-building, where perhaps 30 of them were on site every day, to Eli Lilly, where there are nearly 2,000 people on the construction site, including somewhere in the region of 400 apprentices. There is a vibrancy that goes with that and a wonderful community has been built up in the workplace for young people in training and earning and learning at the same time. It was an eye-opener for me to have some time to listen to the different experiences of people in my region of Limerick and to have the opportunity to talk about civil engineering apprenticeships, auctioneering, landscaping, accountancy, carpentry, plumbing, electrical and the many different areas that people can go into should they decide not to follow the well-worn and perhaps more conventional path to a level 7 or level 8 qualification but instead step directly into the world of work and combine the best of both worlds with their learning and qualifications. We have, of course, heard about many of the challenges around apprenticeships. I touched on some of them already, as the Minister of State did in her speech. Before I finish, I recognise the presence of Katelyn Cummins, the Rose of Tralee. I echo the Minister of State's comments in congratulating her on her personal achievement in becoming the Rose of Tralee and thanking her for the work she has done in making female apprenticeships much more visible. Since 2020, as the Minister of State said, we have increased the number of female apprenticeships across the country by nearly 200%. In 2020, we had 1,017 female apprentices and last year, there were 3,010. That is huge growth in a short number of years and it is thanks to the Minister of State's predecessor and the work in the Department in focusing on apprenticeships. I have no doubt that the Minister of State will continue that strong trajectory and that we will see even an higher level of female participation and participation across all sectors of society, and an increase in our numbers overall in apprenticeships in the years to come. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:36+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-10