Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I thank my colleague, Senator Dolan. I think she is in favour of balanced regional development anyway. She is passionate about it, as am I, and we talk about it regularly. One of the successes of the Department in its three years of existence has been trying to bring university education into the regions. I love going to the north west and west to towns that are now university towns and counties that are new university counties, seeing the sense of pride and local identification of the opportunities this presents and seeing communities and stakeholders coming together to say this is not a Dublin initiative, that they own it and how to make the most of it. It is quite infectious.

The Deputy is right that evidence-based policy is the best and probably should be the only type of policy we do. It makes sense. We know the more we keep people in the regions and provide opportunities for education and well-paid jobs, the more likely we are to see balanced regional development. People choose to keep their roots there and raise their families. I was delighted about that innovative course from Galway. We need to challenge ourselves to go even further. Sláintecare, for example, talks of moving things out of hospitals into the community, where appropriate. We need our education system to catch up with that and we are seeing examples of that in the projects coming through today. The Department of Health is looking at how to upskill pharmacists, where appropriate. It has to be about everyone working to the maximum of their scope, their licence and what is appropriate to do. There is enough work in healthcare and healthcare demands so we need everyone working to the optimum level. We need to go further. Apprenticeships for nursing provide huge opportunities. In case anybody watching this panics, I am not talking about in any way changing from the degree model for nursing. That model was important but we can deliver degrees as apprenticeships.

If we can deliver the nursing degree as an apprenticeship, it will open nursing to men and women who took time out from work to care for their family, or whatever might have been the case, and who want to return to work but cannot go to college full time because they need to earn while they are learning and need to do placements in a different way. The apprenticeship model could bring a diversification into nursing, as well as extra numbers.

We will this year provide pathways from further education and training, FET, to higher education, HE, but we need to do more. We must ensure that people who start a healthcare course - I am thinking particularly of nursing - in a college of further education are not then put into a lottery to decide if they can go on to degree level but are instead guaranteed that what they are doing from day one in FET counts towards their ultimate destination of a nursing degree.

The proposition made by the Atlantic Technological University, ATU, in Letterkenny and Mountbellew to provide veterinary medicine is exciting. That will now go through to the next phase. We do need to expand the number of veterinary places in Ireland with one eye on the importance of the regions. I will keep in touch with the Senator on that topic.