Dr. Ciarán Seoighe:

I will address the issue of the national talent roadmap. I thank the Deputy for the question. The idea is that we need to be focused as a country. We need to understand what skills are required so that we can then deliver against those skills. A recent example of the way we did this is the SFI centres for research training. We understood there was a big demand for data analytics skills. There was a view at one point that the demand was so high in the industry sector that we would never even get the PhD students but we developed these models to create industry-ready PhD graduates and they were in such demand that we were massively oversubscribed. The thinking is to try to understand what skills will be required in the years to come because developing those skills takes time. Working backwards, if we need a particular skill set in the marketplace at scale by 2030, we would have to start that planning process almost now. The roadmap is important because we are a small country and we need to be focused and targeted. It is about understanding where those skills gaps are and where the real impact will be and then targeting the programmes accordingly.