Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the committee. Like my colleagues I recognise the energy, proactivity and reforming approach he has brought to his Department. I might get back to it but the pathway system, namely, the integration of apprenticeships and everything else into the CAO process is revolutionary, necessary and very good. I digress only a little but we need a situation whereby someone can enter life as a mechanical apprentice and ultimately end up with a PhD in electrical or mechanical engineering. Either ladder should work.

The first aspect of the Minister's presentation that I would like to address is cross-Border interaction. I noticed from the statistics the Minister gave that in the past five years there has been a levelling or almost a tapering off or small reduction of students going north and going east. As I know the Minister is committed, this is as much a comment as anything else but I would love to see real links between all the third level institutions along the Border and close to it and their equivalents in Northern Ireland, as well as links further south. I would love to see a situation where students would freely cross the Border for educational purposes. That is the correct thing to do from an educational standpoint but it is also important in the context of our tentative discussions around unity and a shared island experience. If we are to achieve unity, it must be unity of hearts and minds. Obviously, the way to do that is to have educational institutions interacting, co-operating, pursuing joint programmes and possibly periods in each college for students. All sorts of interaction could be achieved. I have recently been talking in the House of the need to extend the great multitude of grants we have at the moment, such as the sports capital grant and so many others.

They should have greater compulsion in their terms for interaction north of the Border. This is a vital area. I commend the Minister and I would welcome another comment from him on how he sees it developing. The potential is enormous and if professional educated people were interacting and getting to know each other and working together, it would build bridges, which is very important. This is an important facet of the Minister's presentation and I applaud him on it. I would like to hear him speak even more about it. The Minister made a virtual visit to our excellent post-leaving certificate college in Cavan recently. There is no reason it should not be a feeder college for institutions in Northern Ireland, and its equivalent in Northern Ireland be a feeder college for institutions here.

The Minister's comments on Scotland were interesting. As he said, it is a retrograde step that we were not able to achieve the old situation of free fees. Senator Dooley referenced nurses going to Scotland. My recent experience has been that many occupational therapists are going to Scotland. It seems to be quite a trend in my area. The college in Cavan prepares people for such a route. It is a victory that the Minister has succeeded with the Scottish Ministers to get access to finance there. I ask the Minister to clarify whether it is a loan system. It is good that the SUSI system will exist for the rest of the United Kingdom, if I have understood the Minister correctly.

The Erasmus programme is very good. The Minister said students in Northern Ireland will be facilitated with an Erasmus programme. I presume and hope he is not just speaking about our students in Northern Ireland but that all students there can use the Republic as a vehicle for Erasmus and can use our system to go to the EU on the Erasmus programme.

The committee heard presentations on professional qualifications at previous meetings. I ask the Chair to correct me if I am wrong but I believe we were told that 14 professions had achieved mutual recognition of professional qualifications, that the number was growing and that the two Governments were engaged on it. The Minister gave this priority in his statement. How does he see the timing unfolding? The obvious traditional area for this is medicine in professions such as nursing. We would like to have mobility and mutual acceptance of qualifications in a gamut of professions. Both jurisdictions are English speaking with similar universities and similar systems, and we were all in the EU until very recently working under the same directives. One would think this should make it fairly readily achievable. I would like to hear the Minister's comments on this.

The new Pathways to Apprenticeship programme is exciting and something for which we have all been hoping for a long time. Could that dovetail into a Northern Ireland relationship? Could the Minister see relationships with Northern Ireland built into this pathway system? As somebody who lives in the Border area, I am very conscious of this but I believe everybody on the island is now conscious that we have to build personal relationships and normalise relationships, and that anything else is a bizarre approach to any talk of ultimate unity.