Apprenticeship Programmes
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11
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Barry Heneghan (IND), Dublin Bay North

I am glad the Minister of State has visited the training board at St. Andrew's in Dublin. Having gone through the points race in the leaving certificate, apprenticeships were never really an option and were not discussed among my peers because we were not shown and educated about the trades route. I now see a lot of people going into it when they move abroad, or if they come up, but they need to be shown more. We need to do more advertising to show people because with the development of housing or offshore renewable energy, we will need these skilled workers. It would be much better if we had a native workforce that could be here to continue with any infrastructure project we have. We have a lot of projects to do.
On these skilled workers, it is important to mention that the system bottlenecks are holding the workforce back. I recently saw that some apprenticeship pathways can be designed to take 228 weeks, yet the mandatory eligibility period means apprenticeships at each phase take far longer than intended. That is something we need to look into. If the time is longer, it will deter people from apprenticeships.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-11