Mr. Neil McDonnell:

I have two points. First, the issue concerning student loans is not one on which Mr. Donohoe of IBEC and I will co-ordinate. While ISME agrees with what Mr. Donohoe has said about the need for a student loan at some level, certainly on our side we would not be talking about anything that looks like the US system of student loans, for example, which the Deputy might be concerned about. It is something that puts an economic value on something that is exceedingly valuable to the individual. It solves the problem of how to allocate very valuable resources if some sort of economic value is not applied to them.

On the question of the NTF, the rate of expansion of the fund of late has been of concern to us. It will almost certainly break €1 billion this year. That needs to be spent on higher education. It must be spent on workplace learning as tertiary education. I do not mean this in any derogatory way but it should not be spent within academia. Rather, it needs to go to workplace learning, lifelong learning and continuous professional development. We have given one example concerning the blue cert. It relates to learning that we have very clearly identified as absent among the owners of small businesses. There are really significant levels of ignorance of health and safety law, labour law, the working time directive and payment-of-wages legislation. Knowledge of this very basic subject matter is absent among tens of thousands of small business owners. It is in this area that we should be spending the money, because it is the employers that are paying. It would be a huge mistake to subsume the funding under the wider education budget.