Mr. Colin Donnery:

I will answer with regard to career guidance. What we are seeing is that people are not really engaged. We have started talking to children in schools and so on, and I am involved a little at local level. It is about getting people to do what they love when they are 15, 16, 17 or 19 years of age. One of the problems in Ireland over the years has been changing fashions - if construction is the fashion today, people go into the construction sector. The same applies to law and medicine. Funnily enough, IT was fashionable back in 1998 and 1999, but then there was the dot-com bust, and nobody did IT for three years. Now there is a three- to four-year gap during which not enough people pursued IT degrees. It is a case of getting people to do what they love doing, or to do a general degree in an area in which they are interested and then specialise in year four or when they start working with an employer. There is much specialisation earlier on, which does not help, as many students drop out in first and second year. They may be interested in the general subject they are studying but not the specialisations.