Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I compliment the Minister of State on bringing Second Stage of this very important legislation to the House and on his opening remarks. This is a time of huge change in our country and our economy. Ar an gcéad dul síos, ba mhaith liom comhghairdeas a ghabháil leo siúd a bhí ag obair sa sector seo ar feadh na blianta. The VEC sector was the champion of adult and further education and was not often recognised as such. I salute the VEC staff whose offices were often set up on low budgets. They did tremendous work. I salute all the staff in the VECs throughout the country and their CEOs, adult education boards, voluntary boards, and adult education officers, and later the community and further education staff who got involved with FETAC training, for the job they did under difficult circumstances in another time of huge change. They adapted and got accreditation for the FETAC courses. I also salute the many voluntary tutors who gave of their time freely, with passion and great gusto to pass on skills adapted to different life settings.

The Government, the Department and this House have a major role in transforming the further education sector. The City of Dublin VEC is one of the main contributors to the proposal, with IBEC, and some other groups. I thank all those who made submissions to the consultation document. I hope that the Minister of State is aware that the City of Dublin VEC got the franchise, or whatever it is called, for handling the third level student grants, under the nice acronym, SUSI. What a fine mess it made of that. It is nothing short of an appalling vista. I and my office have worked hard with many traumatised families in my constituency and beyond who cannot get through the logjam of the bureaucracy and inefficiencies in this system.

Heretofore 64 bodies dealt with these applications. It might have been a lot of bodies and the Government might have wanted to change that but this change has been for the worse. We are now approaching the second year of its operation and things have not changed. I blame the City of Dublin VEC and its set-up and I blame the Department which advertised and drew up the conditions of employment and tender for this huge transformation, taking the role of 64 bodies into one. Surely someone in government and officialdom must have seen what would happen, after the medical card mess, the PPARS scandal and all the things that we have amalgamated into one big body. There is scope here to study past failures, such as the electronic voting machines. Experts went abroad to see those and bought a pig in a poke which I would say cost the State €300 million. PPARS also cost a fortune. All of these things cost a fortune.

In these times there is no work or opportunities for school leavers and because there are no jobs they are forced into education. Many people have lost their jobs and are trying to get third level places. To visit this appalling mess on them is nothing short of a scandal. Nobody is accountable. The SUSI officials invited me to their headquarters two weeks ago and tried to explain and show me what they are grappling with but obviously the advertising and consultation process for setting up the new body broke down. City of Dublin VEC could not have tendered for and got the job without having some idea of what it involved but it could not have been much further off the mark. It did not have enough staff or expertise and had to outsource much of the work, which beggars belief. I do not blame the Minister of State but he has to take responsibility for it as do the senior officials in the Department.

I salute the staff in the VECs and county councils who dealt with this over the years in each county because they dealt with people whom they knew and who knew them. There was a lot of to and fro. I am not saying anyone got a grant who was not entitled to one but one could talk to people. One did not get automated messages looking for information that had been sent in a month earlier. I was told the reason for that problem was that the work was outsourced to a company in Cork but the people opening the envelopes were not there. Tens of thousands of letters containing people's details were kept in a building and the people sending out the automated messages never thought to go in and see whether the information had already been supplied. That is a sheer and abject failure of a system. Does the Minister of State think that he, or his Government, or I as an elected representative can stand over it? I cannot. It is just not good enough to have families tearing their hair out and in trauma, students depending on food parcels, and the threat of people losing their place on courses and so on. It is an appalling mess. I hope that if the City of Dublin VEC has anything to do with setting up SOLAS that it will be better prepared for it.

The problem with the public service is nobody takes the rap, nobody can be disciplined, dismissed or punished in any way despite Croke Park I, Croke Park II or even Croke Park XI. This has to change. We have to become leaner, fitter, tidier and accountable to the taxpayer. We have not been like that for decades and it became worse with the more agencies amalgamated into a larger system. We have seen quango after quango set up to create jobs and cushy careers for the boys. It is just not good enough. The public and taxpayer suffer with services diminishing.

At this vital time of the need for education, we have to get this right. While I value the fact IBEC, the Irish Business and Employers Confederation, was involved in the consultation process, it must be remembered it represents the larger business organisations. It does not represent those companies represented by RGDATA, the Retail Grocery Dairy and Allied Trades Association, or the small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs. We always forget about those companies when drawing up these consultative documents. Why not talk to the ordinary business people and those businesses that the Minister of State, Deputy Perry, deals with every day? Our ordinary small businesses, which are struggling, are the backbone of this economy. Why not give them a voice? One will never find them on any State boards. Instead it will be IBEC appointments.

The document continues:

Our goal should be a further education and training system which targets support for individuals and employers where it is needed most, and allows colleges and providers to deliver the excellent service we must have as we move towards a sustainable vision of a high-skills, high-employment, high-productivity nation.

While there is some jargon there, it is fine language. It continues, “SOLAS need to work effectively with all stakeholders including those outside education and training if their goals are to be achieved.” This is an important point because the new agency cannot be inward looking. We must change our whole education system to make it more adaptable.

IBEC's paper stated:

Work placements are a significant feature of the most effective further education and training courses (the FÁS traineeships are often cited in this regard). However, close links with employers will be required to widen the scope of occupations covered by this type of programme.

The new agency will not be able to operate without extremely close links with employers. It is not just the IBEC companies but also the smaller employers that we must deal with. They are the ones which provided work experience, training and apprenticeships before FÁS was in place. It was these companies that delivered the skillsets that got our economy to move between the 1960s and the 2000s before we all went mad.

The many people involved in FÁS did tremendous work and had brilliant ideas and goals. However, the agency got big - big is beautiful according to successive Governments over the past two decades - and it got out of hand meaning accountability went out the window. However, this did not happen in the smaller schemes such as those volunteers who organise community employment schemes and their participants or the rural transport projects because they were all audited properly. I am chairperson of a FÁS scheme in which, recently, the wages were not paid into the bank because of a 9 cent discrepancy in the accounts. Millions of euro could be wasted, however, on foreign trips, junkets, hairdos and what not. What went on higher up was an abomination. Nobody will be sorry to see the name of FÁS gone. We cannot just wash it away like was tried with the Magdalen laundries. There was good work done in FÁS and a few bad apples should not spoil it all. The agency has a proud record in many areas but it has a desperate record at the top and at board level. All types of training schemes have been cut back savagely in the past several budgets.

There was hope about retraining and upskilling but many people have been prohibited from starting on courses. IBEC recommended, “Where necessary staff at various levels need to be provided with professional development to ensure the needs of the learners and the stated desire to improve 'customer experience' is recognised as a strategic priority.” That should be par for the course for any public service outfit. Why should this jargon have to be recommended when it should be a compulsory part of serving the public with respect and dignity? Training courses should not be needed to ensure staff do their job properly.

IBEC recommended, “A robust quality management system must be developed in respect of all aspects of further education and training activity and provision.” The old education training board system was robust. It was when it became a larger entity it went wrong. We have seen this with the recent experience of SUSI, Student Universal Support Ireland.

A report published by the National Economic and Social Council in August 2011 expressed concerns about the relevance and quality of some of the further education training courses that have come on stream recently. It argued for an immediate root and branch review of all training places on offer. SOLAS must ensure its budget is spent in a most efficient way and must listen to industry, both big business and small-sized enterprises. It must be remembered if every SME were to create one job, we would wipe 350,000 off the live register.

We must increase the effectiveness and speed by which education and training agencies respond to labour markets and learners' needs, as well as ensuring industry is formally involved in course design. Many FÁS courses provided training in construction skills during the boom. However, since the downturn, there are many still teaching these training courses. In some cases, they refuse to reskill and cannot be redeployed or dismissed if necessary. We have to get rid of this job for life belief and work ethic out of these systems. While I accept there are employment regulations concerning these trainers' rights, they must move with the times. They must be willing to upskill and be ready, willing and able to deliver new courses. If they do not, then they will have to be asked to move on. We need every hand on the wheel at this time and everybody to work.

One problem affecting young people is not getting a place on their course of choice. I accept we cannot have an à la cartemenu when it comes to courses but we must nurture and encourage young people when it comes to training. We need to go back into the secondary and national schools system to ensure teachers are reskilled. Deputy O'Brien earlier spoke about how a different type of education is required. Some have argued we need to look at the Finnish model of education. However, I believe the Finnish model can be very cold and uncaring and would be very different to our national school model. The old masters in the national schools did train people for life. That has changed with the onset of new technologies but we must be able to train our young people. I have a young family myself and I know we have to be adaptable.

We can never have the scandals again that occurred in FÁS with no one held accountable for these shenanigans or charged with any wrongdoing. Courses that are most in demand must be provided on a rolling basis so that applicants do not have to wait significant periods to gain entry and are forced to take up unsuitable courses in the interim.

A man came to work with me. He came off the live register and was employed through the Houses. I did not fill out the form, nor did anyone else. It was a 20 hour contract. Anyway, what happened? He found out that he was knocked off unemployment assistance although he was only working a three-day week or a two-and-a-half day week. He was knocked off rent allowance and everything else. The black economy is thriving but that is no surprise. What if a young, interested and self-respecting gentleman wishes to apply for a job to further his career and leaves his young family to travel to work, but he loses everything? That should not have happened. It did not take place under my employment, it happened from one State agency to another. I had to spend €40 on mobile telephone charges to try to get through to the Department of Social Protection without ever speaking to anyone, save for a machine. That is a scandalous way to treat people who are unemployed. It is a scandal to treat people who want to train, change and re-skill. That is outrageous. The system is not fit for purpose.

If I or Deputy Healy-Rae or anyone else in business had customers ringing and had to pay such money then we would not last one week. Most businesses are offering freefone telephone numbers. This must change. I welcome all the IBEC recommendations but I am disappointed that we had no input from small business and SMEs. If we do not listen to such people we will not get anywhere.

There are 16 education and training boards now and these will replace the VECs, as we knew them. I wish them well. In some places there was a good deal of unease about how they came about but I suppose we must move on. The VECs have served the country well. They were disregarded and looked down on by some of the colleges because of snobbery and by some people elsewhere in education, but they were the only people involved in adult and further education and they were in place when no one else was there.

Each education and training board will have a chief executive and the boards will absorb a large number of FÁS staff and training centres when they are established. They will implement training programmes previously provided by FÁS. It was proposed to amalgamate two agencies - I cannot think of the two names now - some time ago. When I inquired about it one year later I was told they still had not amalgamated. All the staff were on learning courses and in arbitration with regard to who would take this and that job. If a job is not there anymore then one goes to the next job. If a person needs a little training, that is fine but the carry-on of arbitration and all the associated issues has grown into the public sector. That is why we cannot afford the public sector. I am not knocking public sector officials. There are some great people in place but there are others who are deadwood and they cannot be sent anywhere. Should they not be sent home? That happened and the two bodies may not be amalgamated as of yet.

The process involved bringing in outside bodies, facilitators and consultants and it cost a fortune. We cannot do anything in this House at this stage without consultants. There is an industry in it. It is the same with the HSE. For example, we heard of cuts this morning to the disabled but there is no talk of cuts to HSE legal fees or consultants' fees. Yet we can cut the allocation to ordinary unfortunate disabled people because it is only €10 million. We can take away that money and they will not fight back because they are all right.

We must ensure this takes place. I am not suggesting the staff should move from Clonmel to Donegal but they should move within reason and they should be put in place without much further training and with little need for consultants. I hate using the word and I will not use the word because it is too horrible but consultants have become like a disease and they are all over the place. We cannot do anything and the Minister of State knows this better than I do.

Let us suppose there is a need to put on a small extension to a VEC building. One needs consultants to draw up reports although the VEC may have done the same thing in a school nearby. Instead, there must be a new design with design fees and architect fees. Let us consider what happened to the VEC building in Clonmel. It had flooded several times in its history. We got a grant of €400,000 for a new building and we got in consultants and design architects and specialists. What happened? Instead of raising the building above the floodplain as per all warnings - one could not get planning permission to build a house there - they built it at the same level. The first flood that came destroyed the whole new building and we had to look for a further €200,000 to redo the entire floor. There were consultants and architects involved and they all got paid, signed off and then left. No one was called to book or called to account. That is what happened to the VEC building in the Mall in Clonmel. It was an outrage that money was paid to consultants and architects to design a building at the same level as the building that had been flooded for decades. That is what the consultants and architects did and they got away with it and no one was held to account. That is what is wrong with the public system. The view is that it is not the money of the Minister of State or my money. People seem to believe it belongs to no one. Anyway, we do not have the money now. I cannot understand why the troika is not getting involved in the public service in these areas. Some people tried to tell us that the troika enforced the cuts last July on disability expenditure. It did not but I cannot understand why it did not examine and establish where the waste is and where this carry on is occurring.

I look forward to working with the new entities. I always enjoyed my work with the VECs. I am a long-time member and chairman of a board and I have been on the local adult education board for years. I salute the volunteers and the voluntary tutors involved. Nothing has been more rewarding for me in public life in the past 20 years than going to the adult education awards and FETAC accreditation courses to see people from 16 to 19 years of age getting certificates. There was joy for entire families. People were getting delivery of service on slim funding which is ever decreasing.

I hope the new outfit will not be related or on the same field as Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, because if it is we may as well forget about it. The names of both begin with the letter S. I know something else that begins with S but I will not mention it in the House because I could not. SUSI was a disaster and it is still a disaster. I hope there is more planning in this case. I am keen to see the officials who set up SUSI and who did all the background work relating to the City of Dublin VEC brought before a committee to answer how they failed so miserably.

Until now programmes have been provided by many different organisations, including FÁS, VECs, community groups, second level schools and private bodies. I have referred to FÁS and the VECs but I wish to refer to community groups. I thank the county enterprise boards which provided funding in my county for various community groups to kit out centres and areas where they could retrain and up-skill people. Many people have been involved and we cannot forget that. We must move on but we cannot forget where we came from. Further education and training is a highly important sector and we welcome any move to strengthen it but the changes must take place and the sector must be brought into the new era. It must be brought up to modern-day needs to provide the relevant services. The Government has stated that since it came into office it has continued with a large-scale reform agenda and it has done so but it is no good making changes unless it is change for the better and unless it provides value for money. Some examples have been unfortunate in this regard.

The primary functions of SOLAS are set out in section 7 and relate to the development and implementation of a natural strategy for the delivery of further education and training. We must pick it up where we got it and run with it and adapt to give the hundreds of thousands of unemployed people and those who wish to re-skill, including farmers and small business people who are not now making a feasible living, an opportunity. Such people wish to re-skill to get back into the labour market or perhaps other cottage industries. These people must be supported.

We must also tackle the army of officialdom which is prohibiting people from starting their own business and killing the entrepreneurial spirit. These people are many and varied. Today I sat in the audiovisual room and heard from shopkeepers throughout the country about the red tape they must go through. It is unthinkable and unbelievable. There was a shopkeeper sitting behind me but he has gone for the moment. Shopkeepers must have three different coloured brushes to sweep the shop floor: one red, one blue and one green. I have said it before and I say it again with no disrespect: the lunatics are running the asylum. This has gone totally over the top with regard to health and safety and HACCP. While I support all of these things and they are very necessary and anyone who is doing wrong should be penalised, all the red tape amounts to a plague. One shopkeeper wanted to reopen his shop and had to pay €8,000 in fees to the ESB to be reconnected. He had to pay €4,000 to a newspaper company for it to supply newspapers to him. That is hello money and amounts to daylight robbery. We should encourage people to re-open shops and keep rural Ireland alive. We must get real and have some vision and passion and embrace change. However, we cannot simply throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The feedback from the consultation process was varied. I am disappointed that it was not broad enough and the next time we engage in consultation I hope the various small business groups with hands-on experience will be involved. The CEOs of companies do a good job in their own right but there is nothing like the man on the ground who opens the shop, pays the bills and looks after the customers and staff. He operates a one stop shop. Often these people need advice and support. Above all, they need a break from regulatory Ireland. They can deal with their problems locally but I urge the Minister of State to ensure that SOLAS is fit for purpose and that we do not see a repeat of the issues that arose in FÁS. The bad work in FÁS was done by a minority. I salute the many excellent officials throughout the country who worked hard for that organisation and I condemn out of hand those who blackguarded the system or let them get away with it. Where was the regulation and the bodies or people who were paid to take charge? Where were the auditors? When I was a board member of Pobal, I once spent two hours at a rural transport meeting trying to account for an underspend of €20 in a budget of €250,000. This was a community and voluntary board with statutory obligations in respect of financial and employment laws. We were, rightly, subject to audit. What went on at the top of some of these organisations was reprehensible and would not happen in Russia. I wish SOLAS well and hope it is being built on a good foundation and will be fit for purpose in terms of delivering much needed services.

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