John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

I, too, congratulate the Minister and the Minister of State on their appointments. Like others, this is the first opportunity I have had to do so. The Minister can take as read that I support the thrust of what the previous speakers, Deputies Martin Daly and Barry Ward, the good Deputy beside me, have said.

I will take a slightly alternative route, however. The Dáil had gone into recess in July 2018 and our party leader, the current Taoiseach, was speaking at an event for the heads of third level colleges and institutions at the Alex Hotel. I do not know what possessed me but I said I would ramble down to hear what he had to say. He made a commitment there. His speech was well worth digging out. From a Fianna Fáil perspective, he traced the origins of our interest in education back to Dr. Paddy Hillery and up through Donogh O'Malley. It was at that meeting that the Taoiseach made a commitment to all the third level presidents and chairs, the good and the great, that, if elected to government and made Taoiseach, he would establish a Department of higher education, research and innovation for the first time. He was true to his word eight months later. It was really good to be there on that day.

We very often see the best of higher education. I do not mean this in a disparaging way but in the past few weeks when there was the big power cut in Spain, we saw that country go into complete convulsions. People simply did not know what to do when all of their electronic gadgets and whole digital world utterly stalled. That is the downside of people not being educated and trained in some of the real basics of life. It is like how people are not able to add when they go into shops any more because everything is done on the calculator or the computer.

There was a very interesting article in the Financial Times of all newspapers at the weekend. I was a practising psychotherapist for a number of years and it prompted me to go back to the theme of Ireland being the well-being capital of the world. I know I do not need to underpin that. It is an opportunity waiting to be taken. This really interesting article in the paper was about forest medicine and nature therapy. Dr. Martin Daly will be interested to hear that some GPs in the UK are prescribing this kind of therapy to patients to help them deal with depression and mental illness.

Higher education has been amazing but as the Minister, all the other Members of this House and I know, the law does not allow pharmacists to prescribe although they are qualified to do so. Advanced nurse practitioners have qualifications that enable them to do A to Z but the State only allows them to do A to D. There are special needs assistants who have graduate degrees and postgraduate degrees but there is no channel for them to move on, develop themselves and be promoted out of their existing positions. In other words, there is no pathway for them to move on.

I was in a Montessori special school recently. I raised this at a parliamentary party meeting last week. The teacher who is regarded as the best in the school was educated in a different jurisdiction and so their qualifications do not enable them to continue teaching here. They will now have to leave this school despite being regarded as the best teacher in it. I am also very interested in higher education as the next step for children with special needs. Whither children with autism when they leave post-primary school? What is the post-primary channel for them?

I have spent ten years banging the drum for apprenticeships. We are in love with technological universities. It was John Major who, with the stroke of a pen, turned all the polytechnics in the UK into universities overnight. There is a technological university campus in my constituency. I love it. It is very popular. Some 45% of the students who attend come from the immediate hinterland. However, it often strikes me that the home of institutes of technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, never saw fit to change its name because it had established itself as a market leader and as a brand that was really worth selling. Let us not lose that brand.

I would love to see a gap year between the ages of 18 and 25. I would love to see community service or non-military national service that allowed students to leave for the year and do the State some service across a range of areas.

We could be really innovative in that and they could really serve their communities well. I welcome the statements. I wish the Minister, Deputy Lawless, the very best. I was delighted when he was appointed. I know there is a good Minister in position, and that he will give it his absolute best and work his damned hardest.

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