Mr. Vincent McCarthy:

To refer again to the Senator's point about collective idea gathering, I have only been involved in the International School Dublin for the past year. I am the chief executive of a not-for-profit charity, The Festival of Curiosity. It is easy for me, as the chief executive of a charity, to approach the system and get funding through Science Foundation Ireland. It is much more difficult for the International School Dublin. It is sometimes seen as a foreign direct investment, FDI, challenge or an educational challenge and where the school approaches, one ends up going around the houses to all these different people and sometimes by the time one gets back to them they have changed. The system does not necessarily have the capacity to understand the strategic challenge of international education at the primary and secondary level through the international baccalaureate.

Brexit give us a chance to look at this challenge through a strategic lens for the first time and we in the International School Dublin can provide the challenges and the opportunity. We can do costings but a shift in our language is very important. We are talking about investment in third level, which is blue-skies research but does give social and economic benefit down the line. With the International School Dublin and the International Education Foundation of Ireland, which it will become, we are talking about an investment in a property but also in the children who attend it, the families who come to Ireland and the communities we will create across the country. Once we get into that language and set up those mechanisms that we would love to contribute to, we can start reframing Brexit in terms of how we can tackle these challenges in a way that sets us up for the future beyond Brexit, not just for the next two years.