Mr. Paul Hannigan:

My thanks to committee members for the invitation this afternoon. Similar to Mr. Miley I will make reference to elements of the written submission we have made that are the most important items from the point of view of the committee.

We are presenting today with Dundalk IT as the two cross-Border institutions within THEA. We are trying to highlight some of the issues we are pursuing in mitigation of Brexit from our perspective.

In 2018, Letterkenny IT set up a cross-Border further and higher education alliance with Ulster University, North West Regional College and Donegal Education and Training Board. We have worked through that alliance over the past three years to build greater relationships among the four institutions facilitating student flows, engagement around industry research and all those aspects of our work. That alliance has been really important in terms of how we develop those relationships. While we had developed these relationships previously, on this occasion it was important that we pursued a system already set up by local councils. Donegal County Council and Derry City and Strabane District Council had already set up what is called the North West Strategic Growth Partnership. The higher and further education bodies could come together within that to work more collectively. It has been very important that the political and education systems have worked together.

A major gap identified over the period has been in the context of the lack of industry engagement in that space. One of the most recent projects we pursued is the smart industry project. We engaged employers on both sides of the Border to work with education providers and local authorities to set up what we call a smart industry board. The latter identifies skills and education needs on both sides of the Border from an employer's perspective. That board was set up in the past number of months. It is very proactive in its activity in that its members can identify skills needs and education providers can work towards meeting them. We also made sure that the region's skills forum is directly involved in that area.

I am delighted that the HEA is on the call. I thank it, and Mr. Conlon in particular, for the support we received through higher education landscape funding to support that initiative in recent years. It is a project that does not fit neatly into that funding model because it involves a cross-Border element, but we need to think about how we can make it more mainstream. The HEA has provided €750,000 from two different funding sources to us. At the moment, the issue is that there is no more dedicated landscape funding to support the initiative as we move forward. We would like to see some element of that continued or some way of continuing it to be found. We believe we have made and are making an impact. We want that to continue, specifically in mitigation of anything arising from Brexit.

When we came into this, and even in the past 12 to 18 months since we went into the project, things have changed significantly from a political perspective at national level. As has been said at meetings of the committee in recent months, there is really no such thing as any benefit accruing from Brexit. However, one major benefit, from my perspective on a personal and professional level, is that the political system is now concentrating again on the Border. From my perspective, it is very important that the system sees what we are doing, why we are doing it and the benefits to communities, etc., along the Border. That is now in the Programme for Government: Our Shared Future and the New Decade, New Approach agreement negotiated last year. All of these are now coming together to create a policy space for us to move and work in. That is very important from our perspective.

We are committed to working together as a consortium. We are committed, as an individual institution, to working with any other partners in terms of the mitigation of Brexit from our perspective. We look forward to a good engagement with the committee this evening.