Mr. Simon McKeever:

I am a firm believer that this will come about. What will make people change on this is legislative change. The CSRD is a huge issue that we need to embrace to help companies change in this regard. It is landslide legislation that will force change and is time-bound. There is the nice-to-have stuff that goes with sustainability and then there is the hard business reality of it, which are two completely different things. What has forced companies to change in the past on these critical issues has been legislation, the Government and business. We are very effective at that in this country, where it is Government-led and there are organisations like ours around the table, where we are able to support the Government but also the Government supports us to get that message out. I think the CSRD with the stakeholders group is the way to start that.

Deputy Bruton also mentioned management skills and asked if we have the capacity within our education sectors to deliver all that. I think we do and I think the education piece is changing. I think the way in which third level education engages with business is changing. We are part of the Convene programme, which is funding the Government has put in. I think it was €17 million initially. We work with the Innovation Academy in UCD and TU Dublin and we have set up a thing called the Institute of Sustainable Trade, which is about professionalising our industry. We are focused on leadership, sustainability and international trade. We originally went down the route of creating a master's programme in sustainable trade. We looked at that and decided there was no point in doing it, so we have gone down the route of looking at developing a professional body. There are, I think, 48 pieces of paper in international trade-related courses delivered by 16 or 17 third level education bodies in Ireland. We work with TU Dublin, the Innovation Academy in UCD and Arizona State University in the United States to deliver a set of on-the-framework and off-the-framework programmes. It is like what we said to Deputy O'Reilly. We are very close to businesses so we understand the problems they are having and we are able to design and deliver very practical solutions to them. There is still a huge demand for all our customs training courses. We are in the process of developing a programme for what are called certified trade advisers. We think we will be able to roll that out to some of the agencies in Ireland because we know what is required.

The capability is there. It is about being a bit more imaginative. One of the things we are looking at in the Institute of Sustainable Trade is micro-credentialing. Typically, if you do a master's, you need 90 credits at level 9. We propose that you could do a professional diploma, another professional diploma and either a thesis or a third professional diploma, each worth 30 points. The way third level education is going is such that you can have a five-pointer at level 9, a certificate in something you might add to and a ten-pointer from something else. The education system in Ireland is looking at being able to mix and match micro-credentialing within individual universities but, eventually, across the universities and then across Europe. We have the people who are involved in that sitting on our steering committee. We see this as the way forward in terms of organisations like ours being extremely close to business and being supported by third level education. Also, the IEA brand is very strong in terms of the training programmes we already provide, so I think we have the capacity to deliver this in Ireland very close to what business needs.