Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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One of the greatest barriers to part-time and lifelong learning is cost. We need to look at that. If people pay tens of thousands for a master’s, what does that say about us? How many people are being excluded? Reference was made to the digital strategy. That creates all kinds of opportunities for us, including opportunities to widen the gap in terms of inequality of access. We need to be careful of that. Will SFI expand on the need to support indirect costs of research? What are those? What effect does underfunding have on researchers' and academics’ ability to conduct research? Is there a rural-urban divide in terms of the physics being taught in schools? Has analysis been done of which schools it is taught in and which it is not? Many people doing computer science, including my son, were never taught at secondary school but go on to do it at third level. It is almost in spite of the system that these people break through.