Mr. Neil McDonnell:

We rightly pat ourselves on the back for the quality of our school- and university-leavers. The PISA score is another objective scoring of performance globally and we are really high in that but the OECD also tests adults. There is a comparison of Irish adults at the end of our paper. I am talking about adults as they start to grey. Our adult performance in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving starts to fall and we go below OECD averages. That outcome is not consistent with increasing productivity. The point we are making is not that we should not be spending more money on our universities but that we should not be spending the National Training Fund on our universities. That is a different thing.

Training spend through Skillnet is highly efficient and effective because-----