Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The concept of the European Year of Skills is an interesting one which is worthy of debate in the Chamber today. I do not disagree with any of the comments made by previous speakers, including the Minister's opening remarks. I have a degree of fear that the skills of today will be challenged by the advancements in technology of tomorrow. We talk about the development of new skills, retraining people who might have lost their previous jobs due to increases in automation and developing new skills but we also need to be conscious that those very skills may be outdated with the rapid increase in technology we are witnessing. This is a very real concern.

In my constituency of Dublin Central and the community into which I was born in the north inner city, this was the lived experience of so many former docker communities that would have earned their living through that trade for decades and possibly centuries. With the click of a finger, increases in automation, which at that time emerged in the form of containerisation, put an entire community out of work overnight. In many ways, the community I come from has still not recovered from the shock of that. We are seeing similar changes today, although they are not as stark. In our local supermarkets, where we would have seen a row of people on tills, we now see small corners with self-service tills. In Deputy O'Reilly's constituency, I see they have started trialling drone deliveries. We will see increases in that. We will see self-driving cars, which I am sure will very quickly lead to self-driving taxis.

I think McKinsey produced a report a couple of years ago that found that over the course of the next decade, 800 million jobs globally will be at risk through increases in automation and technology. This will lead us to very difficult questions that we in this Chamber and the EU need to get in front of. If technology and increases in automation are changing the way we work, we need to consider how we provide protections for people affected by this. There is a very real conversation to be had about a universal basic income. I know colleagues in the Green Party have ensured that a pilot basic income project was included in the programme for Government and this has resulted in a very welcome pilot project for artists. It needs to be expanded because these conversations will be necessitated by changes in the manner in which we work or what entities are responsible for doing those jobs faster than we probably realise.

I appreciate why it is the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science who is taking this debate today. I believe we are talking about skills which, once developed, will sustain themselves. It does not just exist in higher education or the much-valued lifelong learning space but should start in traditional education and primary school through to secondary school. I was involved in initiatives with the Trinity Access programme where we looked at the skills that young people would need to sustain themselves through their early years, teenage years, college and the workplace. We focused on equipping young people with leadership skills. Leadership skills manifest themselves in lots of different ways. It is about ensuring young people have the confidence to know they can contribute to their community in whatever way that may be, whether it through sporting endeavours or involving themselves in local community groups. These type of leadership skills are sustained in the longer term. It means that when we have conversations with a young person about transferring his or her skills to different workplaces, he or she is already equipped with that from a young age.

Regarding the idea of strong mentorship and the idea that you cannot be something if you cannot see it, we talk about trying to get a young person involved in the tech economy. It is very difficult to have that conversation with a young person who probably does not have a family background in it. Ensuring that young people have access to mentorships and guidance at a young age is important. Guidance manifests itself in different ways. In schools at the moment, we focus on guidance in terms of career guidance but if that kicks in at third and fourth year, it is probably too late. We need to ensure that happens all the way through, not necessarily for the career itself but for the ability of a young person to see himself or herself in that space. Guidance happens differently.

We need to ensure that young people have access to emotional guidance because we are talking about lifelong skills. It is not just about the capacity to be an engineer or equip themselves for the tech economy or emerging sectors. It is about fortifying people. This starts with emotional guidance, which is sorely lacking in schools and universities. It is the reason we talk about an adult transferring from a job to reskilling himself or herself. I worked in this area previously. The first stage of that is equipping a person with confidence and that person has probably been failed by the education system and has probably had to take a job that did not give him or her the capacity to pay the rent or put food on the table. All that will decimate a person's confidence. If that job is taken away, the very first step in enabling the person to get back into the world of work is equipping him or her with the confidence to believe that the world out there is one in which he or she can participate.

Apprenticeships are often associated with the sorts of labour which are at risk of being made redundant by technological development. However, this need not be the case. Apprenticeships in the tech and digital industries remain few and far between. Some initiatives in the UK and Germany involve tech levies. We have any number of tech companies along the quays. How many of them provide opportunities to access the industry to people who do not have the opportunity to go to any of the major universities? The communities in the north and south inner city probably get jobs as cleaners but they are not getting jobs in the higher echelons where they would be better paid or more sustainable jobs. To ensure they can get access to them, we need to make sure they have access to apprenticeships that pay outside the traditional industries.

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