Cathal Crowe

And the same applies at second level, third level and all forms of tertiary education.

So the two are inseparable, I would feel.

And what I've seen in recent months is there's now a new emphasis by the department.

Minister Lawless, to look at key skill areas, apprenticeships, absolutely.

I'll deal with that in a moment, but also areas like medical training, physiotherapy, graduate medical courses, nursing.

In terms of apprenticeships, the spend on those has never been higher, but I would say there's a cultural barrier in some ways to

Excuse me, in terms of attracting people into those.

I remember when I was teaching, a lot of youngsters would want to go into the trades, but mom and dad would say, why don't you try the college experience first and then maybe you could look back at that.

So there are cultural barriers we need to overcome, but the money has never been as high in terms of investment.

Yeah, no, look, the employers get a good return from this as well.

There's a lot of challenges coming down the line.

We had a report out at the start of the week about the challenges of AI.

There's green regulation coming.

There's a lot of things that people have to juggle with.

And this is the main funding mechanism to train people in those areas.

I would make the point that these large multinationals very often have a

Very extensive in-house internal training budget, not so for small and medium enterprise.

And the National Training Fund is a mechanism for that.

It's highly funded.

The money's been spent.