Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael)
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I welcome Dr. Ruth Freeman and Mr. Reynolds, again. I know we had a chance to speak about all the work he does. I listened to the opening statements and I loved the way he listed out all the different careers, and one would never think physics was part of them. It is so true that so much of what we do and so many of these careers have a background and a base in science. Dr. Freeman was great in terms of some of the questions she answered there and I might come back to that in some of my questions. It is funny because at home locally there is a potential opportunity for schools to merge. When I was in school, as can be imagined, physics was in the boys' school and the boys came to our school for music, because we were obviously great at music. As well as that we had biology. It was challenging and that is what it comes down to. I do not want to count how many years ago that is but I suppose Dr, Freeman spoke about how 68% of girls' schools only have teachers in specialist subjects. There was an article in the paper yesterday about computer science and the lack of teachers in computer science and how it is now a subject. Dr. Freeman in Science Foundation Ireland there used to be programmes around teachers working with labs and researcher groups and I am curious if there is anything like that happening at the moment around that? Maybe a little bit about if there were courses, when I was an arts graduate, where one could do a subject like say biology or chemistry along with history and French. Last week the universities told us that there is the human capital initiative and things like that to encourage graduates coming through arts or other subjects such as business and so on to maybe consider the interdisciplinarity there. I do not know whether Dr. Freeman can speak to that.