Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael)
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I can see most of the things Ms McGee has talked about today. My home town is Clonmel. I can see it being hugely beneficial to our town. We now have a university in the town. We are building a university on the Kickham Barracks site in conjunction with Tipperary Education and Training Board, ETB. It will be a dual campus for further and higher education together. We have many multinational companies in Clonmel, such as Abbott, Boston Scientific, or Merck Sharp and Dohme. We have a really good SME sector. The average industrial wage in Clonmel is much higher than the national average and the average in rural Ireland in particular.

Our guests were talking about having a collaboration between education and businesses. I see that happening with the multinationals in Clonmel but I do not see it with the SMEs. It is almost like we have to go out to them to convince them to do it. Can we see strong, industrial, rural towns like Clonmel benefiting dramatically from that kind of collaboration? The local enterprise people do good work. There is a place in Clonmel called the Questum centre which is totally full at the moment. They are building a second phase onto it. Businesses have gone from one employee to 100. They have not had that collaboration with what was previously Limerick Institute of Technology, LIT, and is now a university. Can Ms McGee see a benefit for rural towns on the back of something like this?