Mr. Neil McDonnell:

In regard to where SMEs fit into this, our view is that the education system does not adequately interact with the SME body. Probably the largest part of the blame for that would rely on what we see as an overemphasis on the academic and an under-emphasis on the technical. To humanise that, I was at a presentation a couple of years ago where Christoph Mueller, the ex-chief executive of Aer Lingus, was speaking. His entry into business was as a German Army conscript and he became a welder as part of his technical education there. He then did an MBA and then went into business consultancy, and he has been running airlines ever since. I do not think that career model would be emulated here because the technical and the academic are so divorced in Ireland, yet that is what SMEs want. They want people who have a technical competence. That is not to underplay technical versus academic education. If we look at the top ten universities in the world, Caltech and MIT are never out of the top ten and their emphasis is always on the technological while, of course, they are universities. I would not like what I said earlier to sound like a critique of the technological universities but we do not see that emphasis on the technological as sufficient so far. Hopefully, that answers the question.