Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I thank the Minister of State. I am not so sure that the reply would be different if we were in the middle of a boom.

There was a good article by Professor Tom Collins in the education supplement of The Irish Times recently about the existing spare capacity within the institutes of technology, IT, and vocational education committee, VEC, sectors. While the Minister of State has given me a standard departmental reply, for which he is not necessarily responsible because he did not write it, would he agree that we need to respond more proactively to the cascade of skilled people out of secure employment and into unemployment, which is unprecedented?

If I may make this question supplementary to Question No. 20, which is about the extra places that FÁS has been mandated to obtain, the Minister of State will not get part of the FÁS budget out of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment but I ask him to enter into negotiations to see whether the spend that FÁS will put into the private sector for contractors could be directed into the VEC and IT sectors.

There is spare capacity. Professor Tom Collins speaks of it and anecdotal discussions with many of the ITs will tell the Minister of State that many course places are not taken up. I am trying to get a new kind of approach, above and beyond the traditional one to which the Minister of State referred which has been victim of a certain cutback.

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