Dr. Pat Ivory:

I am not saying that it is purely due to that. The second reason people go abroad with high levels of education is because they want experience. They want to gain that experience abroad. If they go abroad with high levels of education and secure good jobs abroad, that provides great value to them as individuals. It can also provide value to Ireland when those people return here and set up companies of their own or work in industry here. I would not view that as being a negative at all, I believe it is very positive that people who go abroad have good levels of education and can secure good jobs. Deputy Byrne said that 20% of the workers are in poor quality jobs. I am not sure how the Deputy defines a poor quality job, but we do need to think about how we look at work and how we define jobs. This comes into the Deputy's question as to whether the industry is providing the right jobs, and also flows into his question about education.

Education and the jobs that are available are not necessarily matched, and that is something which we need to think about. Over the next five years in particular, there needs to be a closer alignment of education with labour market needs. We need to look at what type of education people have, and sometimes it is a matter of providing short conversion courses, so that people who may have done, for example, an arts degree can then do a short-term diploma to convert into something that is more employable. It is a question of looking at this in innovative ways to help people get work and jobs. The importance of vocational type jobs is significant. For example, I have been working with Forfás and with industry in the freight, logistics and distribution sector to look at what type of future skill needs are there. How do we provide career paths in an area like transport and logistics? How do we enable young people to see that there are proper careers in these areas? Not all the careers will require a university degree. It might be more advantageous to have a good apprenticeship or vocational education which could support a very good quality of life and a very good, enjoyable career in that area.

Deputy Byrne mentioned the living wage rather than the minimum wage. I also refer to Deputy O'Reilly's questions in this regard. I believe that debate is about competitiveness. It is not possible to operate in isolation in Ireland. We live in a very global world and we are an extremely open economy. We have to take on board our levels of productivity, the competitiveness of our salary levels, taxation system and support for research and development. Other countries are moving up the chain in terms of trying to attract foreign direct investment, so we need to be acutely aware that our labour and research and development policies must ensure that Ireland remains competitive and continues to attract investment. Even when one looks at the UK one can see much stronger competition there than in the past.

On investment and strategic infrastructure, I would name three areas. Our ports are critical to our trade. Manufactured exports leave through our ports, so they are strategic infrastructure. We have well-defined core and second tier ports in Dublin, Cork, Shannon Foynes, Waterford and Rosslare Europort. Other ports can also make a contribution in terms of leisure and the regional dimension which the Deputy spoke about. Connectivity is important, given that our economy is now built as much around services as it is around manufacturing. Airports provide connectivity to people within the country and people from outside the country who are visiting for business globally, and this is extremely important. The other two areas of strategic infrastructure are communications, particularly broadband penetration, and our energy infrastructure. Those three provide huge opportunities for us to invest over the next five years, to upscale our economy in terms of infrastructure, and to move us up in terms of the league tables and the infrastructure that is available here.

On job creation lacking a regional dimension, we are very supportive of spatial planning and intend to look at that again to see how we can ensure that the maximum is being achieved at regional level . Particularly in relation to the Border counties, there is an increasing need for businesses in the South and North of Ireland to continue to talk about what opportunities we can work on together to support growth and employment in both our areas, as we are doing currently.

As for looking towards higher wages, particularly for low-wage workers as they spend a lot of their money, again it comes down to competitiveness. By having a competitive income tax regime we can help people to have more money while not increasing our wages in the economy and making us uncompetitive.