Mr. Karl Byrne:

The Chairman hit the nail on the head. When we say that we want money, questions will be asked about housing, healthcare and medical care. I agree with the argument made my Mr. Marjoram. However, there is also the other side of the argument. How do we get the medical professionals into the field? At this moment in time, discussions are ongoing. We are engaging with the universities and institutes and telling them that we do not want a repeat of situation that occurred last year, which we knew had to happen because of Covid, where extra places had to be put into the system. If extra places are put into the system, they need to be planned and looked at. The Department is telling us that we need more medical students going into the system. That means that we need more labs and bigger lecture theatres, or we need to roster them differently. To provide the extra medical professionals for the hospitals, we need to invest to ensure that we have quality. I listened to the meeting of the committee a few weeks ago when the employers, such as the Irish Universities Association and the Technological Higher Education Association, were in. They were saying the same thing. We have got to a place where quality has not been affected. That has involved putting many shoulders to the wheel. However, quality will be affected if we do not invest in this regard. We had situations, during Covid, where we had overflow rooms for lectures because we could not fit everyone in the same room. We had to extend the number of lab sessions that we had because there were pinch points around restrictions to numbers in a lab or training session. Those are aspects of the Chairman's question.

I raised an issue related to housing. How do we get the apprentices into the system? We currently have the highest number of registrations that we have have ever had. We have a backlog that we are working through very quickly and, hopefully, will be cleared by the summer. We have engaged constructively with the FET stakeholders. We and the TUI have done that at all levels to ensure that backlog is dealt with. However, the questions remain. How do we deal with Housing for All? How do we deal with retrofitting? How do we deal with those areas? We need to invest. This is where the societal question arises. As a politician in the Dáil, the Chairman is being asked about healthcare and housing. That is where we are looking at all the parts that bring us to the point where we have the person in health to provide healthcare and the builder in construction to build the house that we want built. That is where we interlink. As Mr. Marjoram said, it is our education system that allowed us to advance going forward through the 1990s. That is something that we are asking.

We are at the point where we have to make a decision. There is a radical change with regard to digital and green technology and all that sort of stuff. Will we invest in that? Will we move forward as a country? Will we invest in our society and people?

The people around this table say that is done through the education system. In fairness to the committee, I have seen some of its comments on access and making sure people get into the system. That is why it is very important and why all parties have taken significant time discussing disadvantage and, as the Chair said, ensuring people have an opportunity after they leave school. It is all about lifelong learning as well, so that even if somebody decides to leave school and get a job, maybe at the age of 25, 26, 30 or 40, he or she has the opportunity to get back into the system.