Mr. Andrew Brownlee:

The one thing we must preserve at all costs is ensuring that FET is available in every community. When we talk about consolidation, we are not talking about taking facilities away from towns and villages across Ireland. In Dublin, for example, there are many really small further education colleges and there are also separate stand-alone training centres. Ms Hanney may wish to comment further on this issue. We need to bring those together into an integrated FET college of the future concept and make them larger in scale such that they offer learners much more of a college experience. There is real potential there. Places such as the Monaghan Institute and Carlow Institute of Further Education and Training are new examples of what an FET college of the future can look like.