Mr. Paul Hannigan:

I will address the last question first. As part of the north-west tertiary education cluster, you have the Atlantic Technological University, the University of Ulster, the North-West Regional College and the Donegal ETB, so you are talking about the tertiary education providers in that region. We work very closely with people coming through the North-West Regional College, doing a two-year programme there, and then going to the Atlantic Technological University to top off the degree level. Similarly we have joined programmes with the University of Ulster at postgraduate level and those programmes work quite effectively.

When you come back to the situation about barriers and issues, one of the ones I outlined in my presentation was the healthcare issue. Students will not accept placements in Northern Ireland as part of the programme where they would have done previously. They now have to go to Tusla recognised placements in the Republic of Ireland. That is a huge barrier for people who are already based and studying in Northern Ireland and want to continue to do that. Even though the higher education institutions put together these programmes and the collaborative nature of them, and there are real opportunities to develop even further, it is barriers outside of that that cause difficulties, whether in work placements or in other areas like that. Also, there are programmes where you cannot get funding. I refer to very discounted programmes in terms of Springboard, etc., which those resident in Northern Ireland cannot take advantage of. That does not make sense to me, where you have people living a mile from the Border in Donegal wanting to take on a programme in ATO or wherever.

There are those barriers that maybe could be addressed through the North-South Ministerial Council. We have already had discussions with the North-South Ministerial Council about this. Hopefully that can be moved forward in that space. The north-west tertiary education cluster, where we have the four partners in place, can be seen as a role model of what is possible and we want to continue to develop that.

My responsibility within the ATU is about cross-Border collaborations and we want to extend those even further and build on the success of what is already there.