Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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The Revised Estimate for Vote 45 provides for a net allocation of €3.114 billion. This represents a gross allocation of €3.192 billion reduced by appropriations-in-aid of €78 million. The increased allocation of €409 million to Vote 45 is split into core and temporary by nature. The core allocation increase makes up the majority at more than €328 million. This significant investment will fund a number of major priorities across all areas of further and higher education, research innovation and science. As the committee will recognise, this is a sizeable sector with 400,000 people engaged in learning across the further and higher education landscape. The budget provides the necessary additional funding to advance our world-class education and training system and bolster its critical role in enabling the Government’s wider economic, social and environmental agendas.

This commitment can be seen with an additional investment of €144 million in the higher education sector in 2023. This funding will support the implementation of the reform programme, funding the future. It will also provide additional undergraduate places, including extra medicine places, to meet demographic demand. We have taken steps to address cost barriers to education by investing €80 million to provide increased supports to students. The Department is acutely aware of the need to support socioeconomically disadvantaged and under-represented students in accessing and participating successfully in higher education. This has been prioritised in the measures introduced as part of this budget. An additional allocation of €117 million has been provided to support upskilling and reskilling to meet the needs of individuals and the labour market in responding to the challenges created by the pandemic, climate change, digital transformation and Brexit. This additional investment brings the overall budget for skills to €592m on the Vote and to €1.4 billion overall when combined with the National Training Fund. The measures introduced for skills will increase capacity for apprenticeships, provide additional training places through Skillnet Ireland and drive delivery of some key priorities, including in further education and training and adult literacy for life. There is €81 million investment from temporary funding, targeting four key areas, of which I will give a brief overview.

First, there is €41 million through the national recovery and resilience programme to fund education and training reforms for the technological universities, TUs, and to support Science Foundation Ireland, SFI, in the implementation of the grand challenges programme. Second, €27 million is invested for the continued delivery by the education and training boards, ETBs, of the English for speakers of other languages programme to help individuals displaced by the war in Ukraine. Third, €7 million is invested to provide supports to the sector following the impact of Covid-19. These measures include maintaining mental health and well-being supports in higher education. Finally, there is €5.9 million through the Brexit adjustment reserve to address the impact of Brexit on the Erasmus+ scheme. The Department currently provides funding for 28,000 public servants and almost 13,000 public service pensioners. Some 47% of the Vote’s provision in 2023 is allocated to pay and pensions, reflecting the crucial work public servants are carrying out across the sector. The additions I have outlined, combined with the National Training Fund expenditure of €901 million brings the overall allocation for this Department to over €4 billion in 2023, thus making it the fourth largest revenue budget and the sixth largest capital budget across Departments. I trust this overview is of assistance to the committee. I am happy to discuss these issues in more detail, and we commend the Revised Estimate to the committee.