Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Dillon for his questions and for joining me at the recent meeting with the president of GMIT and the vice president who is based at the Castlebar campus. Castlebar is going to become a university town and Mayo is going to have a university presence. This has the ability to be transformational for Mayo, Castlebar and the north west of our country. I am really excited about it. In many ways, Castlebar and Mayo are well placed geographically in what will be a very large geographic area being covered by the new Connacht-Ulster technological university. I am expecting the application in March although it is up to the consortium to decide when to submit it to me. The latest information I have is that the consortium intends to submit the application some time in March and we will act quickly on receipt of that.

In terms of the learnings, we have a pretty good template, not just in terms of the legislation which we obviously have to follow, but also on a practical level. The Department and the HEA are getting pretty used to receiving these applications, appointing panels, considering the information, QQI inputting and so forth so I would hope that the process will be smooth.

Deputy Dillon has spoken to me on numerous occasions about regional skills, how we decide what courses to run and where best to run them. I met IDA Ireland recently to discuss the need for a skills audit. What are the skills we need in Deputy Dillon's part of the country or in my part of the country now and over the next ten to 15 years? I am hoping that my Department and IDA Ireland can do some work on fleshing this out. Let us call it a national skills audit which will look at each of the regions. The Department is also looking at the skills infrastructure that we have in place. We currently have very good regional skills forums. The Minister of State and I met the north west regional skills forum in the last two weeks. We will be looking at how we can further strengthen and support those forums in their work.

On the issue of capital investment, my note says that the Connacht-Ulster consortium has received €5.9 million in Exchequer higher education landscape funding to assist it with TU development and a further €5.7 million last October under the new transformation fund. I will try to get a breakdown for the Deputy of how that funding has been expended.