Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 9 July 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, and Taoiseach
Engagement with the Taoiseach
2:00 am
The Taoiseach:
There was €40 million funding for research in the previous phase involving joint projects between universities in the Republic and the North on issues of mutual concern. For example, better cancer diagnosis was one project between Queens University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. We will evaluate the work to date. On education, one of the more innovative projects we commenced last year was around school completion based on an ESRI study funded by the shared island unit which showed that school completion was higher in the Republic than in Northern Ireland.
One of the principal reasons for that was the DEIS programme in the Republic. The question then was could we share knowledge, experience, teachers and so on to work on a programme that could be applied in Northern Ireland to help with school completion. We have done that.
I think there is scope for sharing curricula. I am interested in seeing whether we can develop a programme around a shared history or an understanding of people's different perspectives on history. It has often struck me that, historically in the Republic, we would not have had the same access to Northern Ireland poets as we should have had in the school curriculum and vice versa. Either in the English curriculum or the history curriculum, we could do with a kind of shared curriculum. When I say "shared", I mean optionally. It would not be mandatory but it would be there if students were interested. If historians or people involved in, say, the English language could develop programmes that could be there as an option for students North or South to avail of, those are the kinds of area we could do better on in education.
There is the national youth dialogue series. There is an all-island youth group. It has been very effective in terms of articulating its visions for the future. Its members might have different perspectives than older generations. That is something we are committed to. We do not want duplicate. The young scientist competition works very well.
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