Mr. Gerard Smith:

I jotted down the Deputy's questions. I may need to come back to him if I have missed a couple. On the question of other centres, there is a national centre of excellence at Mount Lucas. While that is established under the Laois and Offaly Education and Training Board, it has a direct funding line that allows it to take more of an industry-led approach in terms of planning, upskilling and its work. It seems to have that independence. The Deputy referred to our comment that the AMTCE should adopt a similar model or at least understand it completely to see if there is a better model. My understanding is that is one national centre that is in existence.

On upskilling globally, I have read that section again and it may come across as clumsy but it is not. It is about training people locally but we are not talking about exporting skills to lose them. We sit on the gateway of Europe as an English-speaking country. Our competitive advantage is that the ball is at our foot with regard to embracing automation. It is about capturing that advantage in terms of mastering automation, developing skills locally and having that within the island of Ireland.

On access to DKIT, we work with DKIT but we also work with UCD and DCU and we are working on a tertiary programme for upskilling. As DKIT is our closer neighbour, we work very closely with it. We also work very closely with institutes within our own ETB such as Ó Fiaich Institute of Further Education, Dunboyne College of Further Education and Drogheda Institute of Further Education in respect of PLC students. We work to support these institutes to bridge the industry gap and to facilitate the upskilling of their students to allow them to enter DKIT or another institute or to place them within industry, where possible.

On satellite centres, we leverage a centre within our own ETB. That is based in Navan and is dedicated to a pneumatics traineeship and an electrical traineeship. It is deliberately targeted at the Dublin commuter belt and some of the high-end American tech companies with a view to upskilling their maintenance people. We run traineeships through that centre regularly. That is a satellite centre to ours. It works. We also have the 3D concrete printing facility, for which we hire a facility in Drogheda. That is also a satellite of ours. We are also in the process of procuring a mobile rig under the direction of SOLAS and the Department. We will deploy that to help get early engagement with school leavers through pathway projects. We hope to deploy that across the entire island targeting different industries, different areas of education and different themes we need to go after.

With regard to cybersecurity and growing awareness, this summer has been a horror story. You would hear more about it in the UK, where Marks and Spencer lost £320 million, Co-op lost £207 million and Jaguar Land Rover was also targeted. However, it is not about the big players but our own players. We currently have a post-2016 apprenticeship on cybersecurity. That is run with the LGMA, the county councils of Ireland. Some 14 county councils are involved. It is a blended learning approach. Current county council employees are being upskilled. Some of them have 20 years' experience and some have six months' experience but they are currently being upskilled in cybersecurity. It begins with awareness, the design of systems and the detection and mitigation of threats and moves on to the eventuality of - God forbid - an attack taking place and how to react and deal with that. That started in the summer. We have an event next week to promote that. It is a fantastic testament to the use of the apprenticeship model to upskill existing employees in a certain trade that did not exist five years ago.