Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The delivery of the Regional Skills Fora is through the mainstream providers, so it is still the education and training boards, the institutes of technology or the colleges which provide. The Regional Skills Fora is a move to establish more clearly what needs there are, to create a greater connection and to develop programmes through partnerships with local enterprise. There are some very good examples of where that has been done. Cavan-Monaghan, where a traineeship was developed with one of the very prominent agricultural engineering companies, is one such excellent example. The role of the fora at this stage is to try to build that bridge to enterprise. They are not budget holders in that sense. Their role is to identify what is on offer, identify what is needed and then to try to adapt one to the other. We recently had the first meeting of the National Skills Fora and there is wide recognition that this is an area with real potential. We have not yet built connections to the provision, but there is scope there to do that.