Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Ceann Conmhairle for the opportunity to discuss the OECD report on skills in the Dáil today. It is a timely intervention as yesterday also marked the beginning of the European Year of Skills 2023. This is the year in which we are all challenged to look at the skills in our own country but also to look at skills in our own lives and what skills we may wish to learn or avail of during the course of 2023. This is a year that will focus on what we can do to address skills shortages in our country and also to help people engage in learning through all stages of their lives.

There is no doubt that this country punches above its weight when it comes to the numbers who pursue a third level education. It is very clear from the OECD report that we are not just slightly above the OECD average but very significantly above the average when it comes to third level participation. However, our development as individuals, people, citizens and employees and our desire to reach our full potential do not begin or end with a degree or professional qualification. Education now comes in so many different forms and ways. It is not something a person does at a certain age of his or her life and then no more. We have a well-worn path in this country of a successful leaving certificate examination, a good CAO day, a pathway to university and then on to a job. That works well for many and that is good. It also poses other questions, however. It can place inordinate pressure on young people and by channelling or funnelling and trying to narrow the conversation around skills, it can actually contribute to skills shortages throughout the country, particularly in certain parts of the economy. For far too long, young people have perhaps believed all of their options are confined to a CAO system that does not account for further education and training or apprenticeships. I do not think that is fair on young people, nor is it fair on Ireland or good for well-being, which is why we are changing it. This is about ensuring that every single person in Ireland has an ability to reach his or her full potential. Without making changes, we are limiting the possibilities for people.

We must also recall that when we talk about access to education - if I make no other point, this is one I wish to emphasise - it is not something people do in a time-bound age period. We will increasingly see people wanting and requiring to access education and skills at a certain time of their lives. Perhaps students will no longer just be the 18- and 19-year-olds who go straight from school to university. More and more, it will be people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s and beyond. They could be people with dependants, children they are trying to look after at home or parents for whom they are trying to care. They may be people with full-time jobs who are trying to juggle life and all it throws at them while availing of an education and having a right to be able to do so.

The OECD report, which the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, and I published yesterday, is a culmination of 15 months of work. I thank my Department colleagues and OECD staff for their work on the report. It lays out the blueprint for the change we have started to implement. It states very starkly that Irish people run the risk of falling behind because they do not have the skills they need to thrive. This issue is most stark in the areas of digital skills and green skills. The pace of digitalisation has accelerated and we must make sure we never leave a generation of people behind. We need to invest in providing digital skills to each and every person in the country. We cannot live in a country where one in two of us lack basic digital skills, as is currently the case. We talk about online government and public services and moving everything online. We saw that process accelerate during the Covid-19 pandemic. The types of skills vary too. For some, it can be learning how to Facetime a relative, while for others, it can be paying their property tax or a bill. It can be about how to build a website to put people's business online. For many of us, it can be about acquiring the skills to keep pace with our jobs.

The report also reminds us of the challenges the country and the world face in addressing the climate emergency. We know we need more people to help us make our homes warmer, for example. The Government's action plan on climate culminates in the idea that we will retrofit at least 500,000 more homes by 2030. I am pleased to say we are making good progress on this goal. We need more people to work in this area if we are to reach those targets, however. I am pleased there are encouraging signs. Already this year, 930 people have taken part in retrofitting training. There are, though, other areas in which we need to do better. Sales of electric vehicles, EVs, outweighed the sale of diesel cars this year for the first time ever. That is good progress but we need to make sure we live in a country in which we have mechanics with the ability to repair EVs. That is why we are going to open EV training centres.

Ireland wants to be a wind exporter. That is a massive opportunity to go from being a net importer of energy to being an exporter of clean renewable energy. Again, how do we obtain the skills to meet this ambition? We had some very good conversations at Government about this yesterday. As we pursue the offshore wind agenda, how do we make sure we keep jobs that did not really exist in this country only a few years ago, now that we have an education system that can respond to those training needs? I am thinking, for example, of the wind turbine maintenance apprenticeship programme in County Kerry provided by Kerry Education and Training Board, KETB. These are some of the fundamental issues with which we need to grapple. As new jobs arise, there will be new challenges and responses to those challenges. For this reason, we are placing an unrelenting focus on apprenticeships to ensure we keep up with the demands of the economy. As I said, it is the reason we have to end the snobby or narrow view of education. It is the reason we want to ensure people do not stop learning after they finish school, a college degree or even a master's degree. More and more, we want learning to be seen as something that continues throughout a person's life, albeit in different ways.

The most striking finding of the report is how participation in lifelong learning, reskilling and upskilling in Ireland falls below the top EU performers such as Sweden and Finland. Let us not get this finding wrong or misinterpret it. Ireland is above the EU average when it comes to access to lifelong learning. That is not where we want to be, however. We do not just want to be a little bit better than average. We want to be among the top performers. We want to be leading the European Union when it comes to access to lifelong learning. We need to make sure people do not fall off a cliff in terms of learning when they move beyond the traditional tertiary age. This does not serve us well as people or as a country.

This requires a fundamental change in how the education system works. We must be serious about lifelong learning, a phrase that sometimes sounds like jargon. It effectively means being able to dip in and out of education in a way that works for the individual while carrying on with life and work. If we are to do that, the education system needs to be more flexible. It will be less about people packing their bags and heading to university for four years at that stage of their lives. That is not practical for some people who are holding down a full-time job. It will be more about making sure courses are provided in a flexible manner. It also means that we need to financially support people in how they access education. We want to encourage more people to engage in part-time education. We need to change the Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, grant scheme so that people can access it while undertaking part-time education. My Department is examining SUSI for part-time learning, and I intend to make this a priority in the months ahead.

With the European Year of Skills 2023, we know we face a common challenge. Learning as we know it has changed and systems and people now need to change with it. With economic and social megatrends, particularly the serial digital revolution that is under way and the climate transformation unfolding before us, the change in both our professional and personal lives will only continue to happen faster.

As we continue to grapple with and invest in areas such as digital and data skills, it becomes clearer that as the volume of data at our fingertips grows and technology advances to be ever more accessible, the challenge is to have and harness human skills as well as digital and data skills. This is another important point I want to make. We need to stop using the phrase "soft skills". More and more, we know that soft skills are actually core skills. Skills such as connecting, communicating, collaborating in teams, leading, managing, managing change, deploying resilience, intercultural skills and, critically, the skill of creativity are in our DNA as Irish people. They are not soft skills, to use that dismissive language. They are actually core skills that employers want to see in the workplace and that we require to be well-rounded individuals. We must invest more in our people. The people are our gold. Other countries have big gold reserves; we have our people. They are our most precious natural resource.

It has been said that an education is the one thing no one can take away from a person. That remains true but there is now a new conception of education. It is no longer just something formal that happens to someone young. It is a life course of informal and formal learning. It is the passport that carries and cloaks the individual through change and challenge, the business through volatility and complexity and the collective - our country - through times of uncertainty and ambiguity.

If the global challenge then is to boldly and bravely embrace a fully transformed 21st century model of learning and growth, the trick for Ireland is that we are just as ambitious and successful in our pursuit of this as the previous generation was in embracing education. We have good form in this regard. If we look back at our educational progress as a country across successive Governments and years, we have made much progress. Now, we need to make the same degree of progress in changing educational realities and landscapes.

My Department will now seek to take forward the key OECD report recommendations at pace, including examining options for updating our legislative framework and strengthening the role of the National Skills Council. We need to examine the role of the National Training Fund, which all employers pay into, to see whether it needs to be modernised and ensure it continues to have an appropriate and broad focus on skills priorities for the whole country as we look at future trends and needs. I look forward to working closely with a revitalised National Skills Council to prioritise this important work. I thank everybody who serves and has served on our National Skills Council. I look forward to the discussion on how it can be further reformed and strengthened and how we can provide Skillnet Ireland, our agency that reaches into business to provide for upskilling and reskilling, with further support.

As I launched the European Year of Skills yesterday, I asked every individual in Ireland to learn one new skill this year. I will not ask the Ceann Comhairle in real time what his might be but I certainly intend to try to take up one or two new skills this year. Throughout the year, my Department will be undertaking significant awareness raising, highlighting that notwithstanding the changes we need to make or the reforms to come, there are already many opportunities out there to upskill and reskill and to learn in a way that works for everyone. That is the challenge we are setting and I know we will rise to it. Ireland has always been an island of learning, a country of creatives and a people known for ingenuity with the capacity for change. We need not be daunted by the scale of the OECD report and the scale of transformation we are living through, but we do have work to do. We need to go and do it.

Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)
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Yesterday marked the start of the European Year of Skills, which will run until 8 May 2024. It is an important European initiative that ties together many of the different efforts being made in Europe, including, of course, a kind of European green new deal. It will attempt to raise awareness by matching people's aspirations with the available job opportunities. That is significant for everybody's way of life. It will try to promote investment in high-skilled staff. It aims at a collaborative effort which brings together everyone, including workers, social partners and employers, to improve their skill sets for the green and digital economy. It also has a focus on promoting lifelong learning.

The European Commission stated, "Having a workforce with the skills that are in demand contributes to sustainable growth, leads to more innovation and improves companies' competitiveness." It also stated:

The European Year of Skills 2023 will help companies, in particular small and medium enterprises, to address skills shortages in the EU. It will promote a mindset of reskilling and upskilling, helping people to get the right skills for quality jobs.

Those are noble, aspirational and desirable sentiments and I do not think any sensible person in this House would find them disagreeable. As with other such EU initiatives, the drive to make them a reality will have to come from below. It will have to come from the member states themselves. It will be all about the buy-in from member states and how seriously they take it.

I can see from the Department’s website that a significant number of events are set to take place over the next year. These events are certainly a good opportunity for us to identify the skills that are needed. However, we must do more than that. When discussing the jobs of the future, the Minister mentioned we do not even know what kinds of jobs we will need. That is important. We will also have to establish why skills that have already been identified as in demand have not been brought on board quickly enough. We need to identify the shortcomings in the manner in which the current offerings are made. The delivery methods by which we train people, the way our workforce upskills and how we encourage the process of lifelong learning must be under constant evaluation and re-evaluation. Not only do we know that different types of jobs will come on board and certain skills may not be as needed in the future, we also need to understand why there have previously been shortcomings.

I will focus on the areas of apprenticeships, skills for the all-island economy and lifelong learning. With regard to apprenticeships, we must be frank that we have been failing. If the measure of success is reaching the target the Government has set for itself, it is difficult to reach any other conclusion. In 2016, the Government set a target of 9,000 annual apprenticeship registrations by 2020. In 2023, we still have not reached that target. A new target of 10,000 was set in 2020 but we have not even reached the old target.

The Government had set a target of 750 apprentices working in the public sector and semi-State bodies by 2025. The Minister, Deputy Harris, stated in March that there were approximately 320, which was well behind the target. Very slow progress has been made on the establishment of new types of apprenticeships, particularly those aligned with modern methods of construction, MMC, and green construction-related work. More work needs to be done in this area, specifically when we look at the total inadequacy of our housing supply. We need to be looking at that from a green perspective but also from a delivery perspective.

In 2018, the Government established the construction sector group to promote MMC and the skills it requires. The Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science has put out skills reports which identify many of these new apprenticeship types but they are very slow in coming on stream. Part of the work of the Minister and his Department must not simply identify those skills we already know we need but must identify the underlying reasons we are not making progress. We know there are far too few choosing apprenticeships relative to the time before the financial crisis. It is not hard to understand why. One report I came across by the Department spoke to that point and mentioned the precarity of work in the Irish construction sector. We have a history of a cycle of boom and bust and bogus self-employment, as has been discussed at length in this Chamber.

Earnings for craft and trade workers in Ireland are the most unequally distributed of any high-income EU country. This is driven by an intergenerational earnings gap that has widened more than in any other high-income EU country except Belgium over the past 15 years. The gap between the earnings of craft and trade workers under the age of 30 and the older workers in Ireland is now the widest of this group, and the median hourly rate for young workers is second lowest behind Italy when adjusted for living costs.

Significant numbers of our apprentices qualify and head off to places such as Australia and New Zealand. We see this pattern repeated in the likes of the healthcare system. That is easily identifiable and needs to be addressed.

I will move to the all-island economy and will focus on a particular example that was raised with me this week. There are students in Donegal who want to do apprenticeships in North West Regional College in Derry city, which is recognised for having excellent facilities. It is close by if you live in Donegal. However, there is a major barrier, which is the requirement for the employer to be registered and based in the North. Students with a local employer in Donegal who want to live in Bundoran, Buncrana or wherever else cannot use that employer if they are attending the college in Derry. It means they have to look to places like Galway and Cork for the educational part of their apprenticeship, which makes things more difficult for people with the cost of travel, difficulties finding affordable accommodation and not being able to commute as easily. I hope that, as part of the year of skills, we can examine ways to support the throughput of apprentices through the system with a greater all-island approach.

In respect of workforce upskilling and lifelong learning, there are a few things I would like to note. The Joint Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science has been hearing about the work that is being done to promote the teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM. We heard there has been difficulty in getting teachers and lecturers in that area. We also heard that one of the courses designed to try help people upskill in these areas was run by Coláiste Dhúlaigh in conjunction with Trinity College but that course has not run since 2019. If we want to encourage people to upskill, we need to ensure an availability of courses that are sufficiently promoted to let interested applicants know of their existence. Many industries remain paper-based and are badly in need of digitalisation.

In recent years, new part-time courses have been brought online and are designed to meet critical skills requirements in the digital area. These are courses which tend to teach a range of skills, such as computer programming through the package Python, database management systems like SQL, and statistical methods. The introduction of these courses was certainly welcome. It followed on from earlier efforts at identifying the skills that would be needed for the economy of the future. However, we should recognise there are significant dropout rates in those courses. There is a consensus among some that the difficulty and intensity of the courses for the people coming from unrelated backgrounds contributes to the high dropout rate. When these courses were first introduced, it was felt that it needed to be a case of sink or swim.

But, as noted in the Irish Examinerin December, one in 14 Irish households has never even used the Internet. If these courses are to try to bridge the gap and there are high dropout rates, then there should either be more basic intermediate courses or the duration of the course could be spread out over a longer time period. For many people working long hours and with families, an intense course that runs three to four nights a week for two years, with significant assignments and exams, can prove to be too much. A more relaxed approach could be needed.

I am running out of time and my colleague, Deputy Ruairí Ó Murchú, wants to contribute. I just want to mention one proposal that has been attracting a lot of attention. That is the idea of a job guarantee scheme, where the State acts as a kind of employer of last resort. The European youth guarantee scheme in some ways offers a model for this. This was a commitment by member states to ensure that all young people under the age of 30 receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, an apprenticeship or a traineeship within a period of four months of them becoming unemployed or leaving education. That is a very interesting and exciting concept but it is not something we have always lived up to. This is something we should look at, given the budget surpluses of €65 billion by 2025, and this being the European Year of Skills. We see the difficulties a lot of young people have. They want to stay in the country and they cannot for a variety of reasons such as the cost of housing and other costs. This is an extremely good model and it is something on which we should focus.

Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I apologise for any repetition from the last time we spoke on these particular issues. I agree that the debate is timely. We have the OECD report on skills. We also have the beginning of the European Year of Skills. We had Europe Day yesterday. We all know the positives from the solidarity that Europe has shown to Ireland particularly during the time of Covid and through the entire period of madness post Brexit. Europe has shown solidarity and support for the Good Friday Agreement. As I have stated on more than one occasion, Europe will eventually play a role in delivering Irish unity. However, that is not what we are here to speak about today.

Europe faces the worry, like much of the world, that it must protect people from poverty. That is the biggest protective piece we can have. Education is one of the means by which we do that. As I have said many times before, there are a lot of people who are well removed, who are on the periphery of society, and for whom we need to make interventions and to bridge that gap. That is a vital piece that needs to be done.

I agree with everything that has been said. We all get the idea of lifelong learning. We get the idea that there are certain skill sets that we may have all learnt, due to slightly different living conditions over many years, that need to be taught. I have spoken before about soft skills and the need to build that into the curriculum, whether that is in secondary school or starting college or further education and training. That is a piece of work we need to look at. We have all heard employers state at times that there are certain skills they would like to see in employees that are not necessarily always there on day one. Anything we can do to facilitate that is important and absolutely vital for young people.

We welcome the whole idea of apprenticeships. We know that we are not just talking about the necessary trades that we do need, because we all know the housing crisis that we are in and the fact that we will need a hell of a lot more people. We know about the delays with apprenticeships. Somebody contacted me in recent days because the person is under pressure. The person is 18 months behind on an apprenticeship. We all know there are issues in this regard, and they must be dealt with as quickly as possible. We know the absolute need to ensure these young people will have the skills that we require now. We must facilitate them to get through the system as quickly as possible.

There are also apprenticeships and lifelong learning. There are different shapes and structures to what we understood previously in relation to college. I have often spoken about the post-leaving certificate courses, PLCs, and the journey taken, including by my own familial connections. My stepson did a PLC through to the Dundalk Institute of Technology, DKIT. I can only see positives in it. My other son is attending a course in the Ó Fiaich Institute at the moment. I have spoken many times and I will engage with the Minister, and other ministerial colleagues, about the fact that the Ó Fiaich post-primary school and the Ó Fiaich Institute of Further Education that provides PLCs are constrained by space and their expansion must be facilitated. It is pity the senior Minister is gone because I will obviously be chasing him up about a necessary meeting with personal assistants, PAs. I am talking about PLCs and the Ó Fiaich Institute on the basis that these are some of the vital building blocks we have in regard to skill sets and ensuring that we have the people, whether we are talking about tech, pharma, across STEM and beyond, so that we ensure that we have delivery.

We have all talked here about workforce planning. At times, an insufficient amount has been done. We must look at assistive technologies and reasonable accommodation to facilitate those who have greater needs to be able to get into education and employment. I have mentioned DKIT. A vital piece of work must be done to ensure that under the new president, Diarmuid O'Callaghan, we are able to deliver technological university status. That is an absolute necessity. I could probably go on for a long time, but I will not.

Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. I congratulate the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, for the work he is doing in his Department to lead on the strategy. It is essential that we widen and deepen our skills space here in Ireland. I note that the European Year of Skills centres on the whole idea of reskilling 6 million people in the area of digital and green technology skills. Given the scope of it, how we apply this in an Irish context can be broadened and deepened. What I repeatedly see in my constituency office is people unable to fill roles that they have advertised in their companies and businesses. The skill of butchering is also dying out. At one point it was a skill where you had to fulfil an apprenticeship, but now many of the larger meat producing companies sell a full carcass that is cut up and can be sold directly in the butcher shop. The art of butchering is gone. I know of one butcher in County Clare who wanted to hire a butcher. He advertised online and in the newspaper but he did not get any uptake on it. Eventually, he came into my office and we had to assist him with getting a work visa for somebody to come from South Africa. That just tells us how it is.

I also know of a number of public bus routes in the Limerick and Clare area which could not get going for a number of months because there was a shortage of drivers. Thankfully, that has been addressed. I applaud the Government on the initiative taken to allow Ukrainian drivers to drive large vehicles and to convert and upskill their licences. The Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, was very much to the fore in that regard.

The area of renewables is an important one that must be explored. Green technology is quite central to the European Year of Skills. The level of offshore projects we have planned in Ireland is monumental. If we add up all of the floating offshore wind projects that are in the pipeline at the moment for the west coast, they have a cumulative value of some €76 billion, which is absolutely colossal. They may not all see the light of day, but these are projects that large companies and industry are prepared to put a buck behind. They are prepared to invest and the Government is prepared to explore the options in that regard. We have set up the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, MARA. We have all of the frameworks in place. The resources need to be augmented a little bit, but a lot of this will happen. Many people are saying the opportunity now that this offshore floating wind energy provides is quite similar to what Aberdeen had in the mid and late 1990s when there was an abundant supply of offshore oil off the Scottish coast. This is an opportunity we must seize. If we are to make offshore wind a success, we must look at the skill sets involved in that whole area.

Concrete shuttering is a skill that has totally fallen off the agenda in Ireland. It was very prevalent back in the 1950s up to the 1970s, but that skill is no longer taught in any institution. It is no longer a skill, yet it is absolutely essential from an anchoring point of view that we have that skill in abundance, certainly along the coastal parts of Ireland. A whole plethora of skills are involved in the maintenance and repair of offshore wind turbines. This is also a skill we need to get ahead of.

The Minister of State, Deputy Collins, knows this because Shannon Foynes Port, which will be one of the main gateways for this energy, is in his constituency.

I wish to talk about Ireland's population trends. The population of Ireland in 1959 was 2.8 million, whereas its population in 2023 is 5.1 million. Our population is very much on an upward trajectory and this will continue. The reality is we are in a very unfortunate scenario with two intersecting factors competing: a shortage of housing and a shortage of skills. We need an increase in population, yet that would only exacerbate a crisis we already have in meeting the housing needs of our current population. Over the next five or ten years, we will require an even greater population to fulfil our economic needs and meet our workforce requirements. The examples I have given, be they associated with a butcher's shop, bus routes or skilled labour in the offshore wind sector, suggest there is not enough labour to meet all the needs.

The Government should have a strategy on this. If we do not, we will have our eye wiped for us by several of our European counterparts. A very senior European diplomat recently told me that if Ireland does not position itself to reap the full benefits of offshore wind, the likes of the ports at Bremen, Hamburg and Rotterdam will be able to build offshore turbines, tow them into place and avail of the lucrative opportunities that phase 1 of offshore development presents. Phase 2 is the construction, of course, and phase 3 is reaping the environmental and, indeed, financial rewards. If we do not have a strategy, our eye will be wiped.

Recently there was a very good announcement on jobs in County Clare. It was backed up by investment and Government support. It was only after the fanfare had died down that someone in the company said it was going to struggle to recruit the people for the jobs. That is not ideal. At least the investment is coming and the jobs are being created, but we need the human capital. We need people to do the work. Now more than ever, there is a strong argument for having a west coast counterbalance to the greater Dublin economy.

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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When I was Minister for Education and Skills, when education and skills were harnessed together, I set a target to make Ireland the best education and skills provider in Europe by 2026. I do not know whether that is still monitored. An important approach to governance is to have such bold ambitions.

Ireland has a lot to be proud of in this context. We achieved the fastest expansion of third-level education anywhere in Europe. We are at the top of the table in mathematics and reading. We have created hubs where the competitive advantage of key sectors is built on skills, and we have displayed new flexibility in respect of supply. Springboard, the human capital initiative and the expansion of new apprenticeships are good examples of progress.

Past success should be no grounds for complacency in the future, however. We have to take note of what we know. Our examination system is caught in a time warp. It is a straitjacket on teaching and learning. Indeed, experts from the OECD described us as creating an education system for second-class robots. Despite the fact that William Butler Yeats is alleged to have said education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire, it seems we are wedded to the filling of the bucket method of examination. We have underdeveloped on the job, despite the great progress being made in apprenticeships. We still do not have a model that sees employers routinely channelling new opportunities in this area and creates an opportunity for people without contacts in the sector to make a commitment. The area is still not well developed.

Design thinking remains a very poor relation in our education and skills development. We simply do not cultivate enough leadership skills or capacity for innovation in any part of our education system. We have not invested in that. The recent report by the OECD represents a valuable input into this debate because its central message is that, as we enter a major period of transformation across climate, technology, artificial intelligence and demographics, we are not particularly well equipped to take on the challenges. The report notes that skills displacement may affect up to a third of the workforce. It shows that low-skill employment is in sharp decline and that Ireland is not strong on problem-solving capability, despite being tops in some of the more traditional ways of measuring progress. Most seriously, it shows our workplaces need to be much better designed to stimulate the use of skills and cultivate their development. These are really well-made points on where we need to make changes and on bringing people, especially employers, with us, along with enterprise. I do not believe Ireland, by comparison with some European countries, has a tradition of enterprises having that level of commitment. It is understandable why that is the case but we need to recognise it.

Productivity in Irish-owned enterprises is growing at less than 1% per annum, whereas in multinationals it is growing at 6% per annum. Clearly, we have an issue regarding how the very skilled workforce we create from our education system is driving innovation, change and development in the workplace. We need to think long and hard about that.

The four-way classification of how we should address reform is very useful. Regarding supply, we need more rounded skills and more investment in management and leadership. I recall that the McKinsey study shows the single greatest impact we could make in our society would be by investing in management and leadership, which are underdeveloped.

There are many useful suggestions on lifelong learning, better workplaces and better governance. On governance, I would go back to the model we had when I started in the Department of Education and Skills in 2016. We do need to have some bold skills and greater accountability. The message from the OECD is that our system of governance is too dispersed and does not have the leverage hoped for.

I believe it was Albert Einstein who said education is what is left when what you have learned has been forgotten. We should take this to heart because the skills we need relate to team building and problem-solving, not trigonometry and dates in our history. One of the reasons Ireland struggles with some of the major transformative changes it has to embark upon is that we still have the marks of the very siloed thinking that was embedded in our education system. We need to find ways of breaking out of the narrow silos. I commend the Minister of State on introducing this debate to the House and hope this is the start of a serious programme of reform related not only to some of the OECD's proposals but also to wider proposals on how we can have greater leadership, innovation and experimentation in our education system.

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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The world is changing. Ireland is changing. It is really important not only that we move with these changes and trends but also that we get ahead of them, because that is the only way we will gain a competitive advantage. Key to this are education and skills in the green and digital sectors, as well as reskilling and upskilling. Reskilling and upskilling our workforce should not come at a cost to workers. One of the most offputting things for workers who want to reskill or upskill is that they will bear the financial cost, in addition to the bulk of the time cost. For many years, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has been seeking protected time for workers who wish to reskill or upskill. If we want to secure our economic future and sustainably grow our economy, we need to offer workers protected time. Similarly, the State must also supplement the costs in a real and meaningful way. It is fair to state the costs should be shared between the State and employers, because it is they who will ultimately benefit from reskilling and upskilling.

Springboard is an excellent initiative but has been severely scaled back over recent years. Similarly, Skillnet Ireland does brilliant work bridging the skills gap for workers, but it could do more with additional help from the Government. Delivering on these two fronts will no doubt increase the number of workers upskilling and reskilling and significantly benefit our economy.

May I pivot to focus on the need for necessary skills to help grow and diversify the economy in the green and digital areas? A central plank of the Government's White Paper on enterprise is diluting the concentration risks in the multinational sector by growing our domestic SME sector.

Key to this is helping to grow the State's indigenous SME sector as it will help with economic diversification and protect our economy from external macroeconomic shocks. Growing the SME sector, increasing the proportion of SMEs that export and addressing the long tail of low productivity across the domestic SME sector are core issues that must be addressed. The White Paper on Enterprise indicates a focus on strengthening the Irish-owned exporting sector, particularly from the existing large cohort of non-exporting SMEs. Irish companies must export at an earlier stage in their life cycle than those in other European countries and only 6% of Irish SMEs currently export with many exporting only as far as Great Britain. This is an area that needs bespoke planning and support to ensure workers and employers have the skill sets necessary to help export to new and growing markets.

The White Paper on Enterprise recognises that we have a long tail of low productivity in our indigenous sector. The only way to address this is to facilitate lifelong learning, reskilling and further education through funding and other supports so we can increase digitisation, ensure investment in new and better technologies, bridge the digital divide and surmount management gaps.

We must also invest in research, development and innovation. Innovation is the best way to generate sustainable long-term productivity growth. However, analysis of European and global indicators shows that Ireland is drifting in the wrong direction on innovation score cards on international competitiveness in the area of research and development. Ireland has moved in the right direction on European innovation score cards and is classed as a strong innovator. However, we are not yet innovation leaders like countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, and we could be. I discussed this with the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment this morning at a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The aim is for us to become innovation leaders but we need to put the effort in to be able to do that. The European score card indicates that our performance is at 118.9% of the EU average but our lead over the EU average is becoming smaller. On the global innovation index, we have drifted from 12th to 19th place and on the International Institute for Management Development world competitiveness indicator, we have drifted from seventh to 13th place. It is imperative that Ireland becomes an innovation leader and breaks into the top echelon of innovation world leaders. To achieve this, we must see significant investment in skills, including supports for management capabilities and adoption of high-performance work practices to ensure SMEs across Ireland can increase their productivity, innovation and competitiveness.

When the Minister of State presents people with an opportunity to upskill and reskill in their workplace, they will grab it with both hands. I have seen it. However, it must be fair. They have to have time off to do it. It cannot all be at the expense of workers, particularly those on low incomes who will benefit more proportionately from an investment in their education.

Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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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.

Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I am often minded of the low ebb this country was in about 12 years ago, around 2011, when the tide had truly gone out. In the decade or more that has passed since then, I think it is safe to say we are in a better place. It is not often acknowledged how the efforts of the two previous Governments, Fine Gael and Labour up to 2016 and Fine Gael supported by Fianna Fáil under the confidence and supply arrangement up to 2020, helped us get to the position we are in now where we have a very successful economy and, in many respects, it is problems of success that we are trying to deal with, and they are real problems. I acknowledge the Opposition as well because it has played as important a role throughout that decade in holding the Government to account and pushing it. While we in these Houses do not agree all the time or on the detail, I think it is a collective success of our country and our politics that we are no longer in the position we were back in 2011.

We speak about the problems of success all the time here. One is the challenge of being at full employment and the constraint that is there now on taking this country in the direction it needs to go. I am very passionate about this country’s opportunity to develop as a sustainable society and economy but we cannot do that unless we figure out how to address the capacity constraint. There are a few ways to do it. One is to direct our young people to the roles and jobs of the future. There is certainly an important role there but it is probably not enough to get where we need to go so we will need to talk about reskilling. There are many careers and roles that unfortunately are going out of date. We need to do everything we can to transition our workforce to this new society and economy. It would be better for us collectively and it would be better for the individuals as well if we do everything we can. We have to talk about the sheer scale of reform that we are embarking on in the green transition. It is monumental. It is not just the young people in this country who will transition to new careers. We will have to welcome more people with the skills we do not have and cannot expect to have in the numbers we need. We have to welcome them to this country and figure out how to do that and in such a way that it works for them and for us and that it gets us to where we want to go.

We talk about some of those skills in the House quite often. We do not have enough engineers, planners or ecologists and we do not have the people to design our transport networks. All of those critical skills are needed in this country right now but we simply do not have enough. I have spoken here about this country’s huge wind energy potential. We have the energy but we just do not have the people to build it out or at least to do so as quickly as we would like. We must figure out how to get those skills into this country.

It is not simply about the skills, however. Those people will bring with them their families and they will put pressure on the systems that we have - our education and health systems, our housing and justice system - so we will need more people to keep those systems going as well. What we are likely to see in the next number of years is a real acceleration of population growth in this country. I think it could be very positive but it will bring massive challenges too. As a Parliament we must figure out how to do that.

I am very excited by the potential that is there which we can achieve if we work together, as we have done. Notwithstanding the daily battles that take place here, I think we have shown we can work together and perhaps unlike any other economy or society in Europe, we have shown that we can go from the lowest ebb to the success that we have now where we are dealing with the challenges of success. I do not want to underestimate them because they are very significant and not everybody is in the good and healthy position we want them to be and we have a lot to do to correct that.

On broadening the skills in our economy and society, I will be a bit parochial for a moment. The Minister will be very interested in this issue and it is something he knows a lot about, namely the intention to develop another veterinary school in Ireland. The University of Limerick is very well placed to be the location for that. It has succeeded, when many universities in this country did not think it would, in developing the graduate-entry medical school about 15 or 20 years ago. It is an excellent institution. The University of Limerick has been an incredible success, not only for Limerick and the mid west but the country. I believe the new veterinary school should be located in the mid west because that is where the need is for new vets. It is a good example of the challenges we have. Some 82 veterinary graduates come out of our universities every year but 320 are registered annually. Of the 240 who do not train in Ireland, some 50% are from Ireland and have trained in other countries and the other 50% are not from Ireland and have come here to work, so there is a clear need. It is one of countless examples of where we need to ramp up the numbers of people in our workforce. We will have to reach out to other countries to get those skills over here. There is a lot that we can do at home though, such as developing the new veterinary school at the University of Limerick campus and encouraging our young people to go into the areas we need them to go into. I hope the Ceann Comhairle will forgive me for being so parochial but it is not simply an issue for Limerick or the mid west. University of Limerick is very well positioned to be the location for that veterinary school but it also demonstrates the challenge we face across all society and the whole economy.

Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein)
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I will focus on two areas. First is the skills shortages around renewable energy, wind energy in particular, but also apprenticeships more generally. In late 2021, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment published Skills for Zero Carbon, which was produced by its expert group on future skills. It looked to assess in exact detail how many people, doing what kind of jobs would be needed to deliver our renewable energy, retrofitting and electrical vehicles by 2030. It estimates that by the end of 2030 we will need an additional 552 wind-turbine technicians and more than 1,300 ships crew and officers for wind alone. Across the three categories mentioned, it estimates that more than 1,700 electrical engineers and more than 100 ecologists and many other professions will be needed, primarily through apprenticeships rather than universities, such as electrical fitters, plasters, carpenters and joiners.

One of the real challenges we have in the context of renewable energy is that it is very often seen as primarily an issue for the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. Yet, the skills and domestic supply chain are as much the responsibility of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment as they are of anyone else. Great work is being done by organisations such as Wind Energy Ireland, which runs a bridging training programme that helps jobseekers who have suitable professional backgrounds to get into the industry through an intensive one-month training programme followed by work placement in industry. They have been putting 30 turbine technicians through the programme each year, which is significant. In the context of what we will require, however, an awful lot more will be needed. As already stated, we will need an additional 552 by 2030.

Good work is under way, but there are two important factors to note. First, we are not training anywhere near enough people to meet the demand that will exist by the end of 2030. Second, there is no guarantee that we can hold onto those have. We are the neighbours of many economies where the renewable energy sector is much more developed than ours. They will potentially have significant competitive advantages over us when it comes to competing with them for people with those skills. A good turbine technician has a skill set that he or she can take almost anywhere. There would potentially be opportunities for them in Scotland, Britain, Denmark or elsewhere. Throughout Europe, there is a huge shortage of the kinds of roles we need. For example, if Scottish wind farms are to move ahead of us in their development pipeline, they will be coming here to look for engineers and turbine technicians to work in Scotland.

Another issue I want to address is that of apprenticeships. I have raised on many occasions in the Dáil, as well as at the relevant committee, the fact that a cultural issue exists. I have made the point that sometimes we measure schools by the number of people they send to university. We should not do that. There are many schools that are not sending young people to university because they have not had the opportunity to do so. There are also schools that are sending too many. Young people are going into universities when they would be far more suited to taking up apprenticeships. There is a cultural issue that needs to be addressed. There is a broad, cross-party awakening to the fact that it needs to be addressed. I acknowledge that the Minister of State and the Minister are aware of the need to address that matter. We will see over the course of time how that works out. That message needs to go into the schools and to be addressed with parents as well.

There is also the need to look at how we improve and freshen up requirements for current apprenticeships. I previously asked the education and training board in my area to look at providing maths support for people who are looking to do an apprenticeship, because the maths requirement can be a barrier for many. I am referring here to apprenticeships such as instrumentation. A solution to that would be to award maths tutor hours to youth services. There are plenty of young people who could enter apprenticeships with a few extra supports. Youth projects are one possible means of support. There is also the issue of day release or block release, which we need to look at. There are different approaches that would suit different employers who can sponsor apprenticeships. Many smaller employers find it difficult to manage. They would much prefer to have an apprentice for four days and for them to take one day off the job, to having a block of six months or 12 weeks. This can be very challenging for small tradespeople.

I have raised this final issue before. In some areas where there is high demand for apprentices, such as electrical and instrumentation, because the pay in industry is so good, it is difficult to find instructors for people in order to clear backlogs. I am not sure what the solution to that is. The industries involved have a potential role to play, because pay for instructors is part of the public sector pay talks. Is there something they could do to assist in clearing the backlogs and to ensure that an adequate supply of people come through in areas such as electrical and instrumentation, where there is high demand?

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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Deputy Boyd Barrett is sharing time with Deputy Barry.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I will have four and a half minutes and Deputy Barry will have two minutes.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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There is no equality in the sharing.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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It is swings and roundabouts.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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It seems to be swinging all the way.

Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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Some are more equal than others.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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When I studied economics in school, there was a debate about what created value in society. There was one page about Karl Marx, which stated that he argued that all value derived from the labour of workers. There was one paragraph that said Karl Marx was wrong and that it is much more complicated. It then went on to say that entrepreneurial skill, capital, rent and various other factors were also involved in generating wealth and value. Interestingly, the economics textbook did not mention that Adam Smith and David Ricardo, two of the classical economists who supported market economics, agreed with Marx. This is something that is rarely commented on. They said that all value derives from labour. We are discovering, notwithstanding the dismissals in the economic textbooks I was forced to read, that Marx, Smith and Ricardo were right. It is the workers who make the world go round. We are discovering it at the moment because we have oodles of capital and budget surpluses where the Government is swimming in money, but we do not have the workers to build the houses we need. We do not have the workers to make our hospitals function. We do not have the workers to sufficiently populate our schools with teachers. You can go on through the list of areas, such as IT workers and so on. Things grind to a halt without workers.

Often, those workers are not recognised for their value and for the fact that they make things that make the world go round. Without them, we would be in deep trouble, but we do not recognise them. In fact, we start making it difficult for many people at an early age to get an education in our universities because we charge them fees. This prevents whole sections of society from access to developing the skills and creativity they have.

I will cite nurses as an example. I will not disclose my source, but I understand the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland says that this year more graduate student nurses are looking for certificates to work abroad than they are looking for certificates to work here. They are leaving because we are not looking after them. They have to struggle to qualify as nurses and midwives. They have to do unpaid work when they are on placement. Then, when they graduate as nurses, they cannot afford to live. From speaking with the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation earlier, I know that nurses are spending, on average, approximately 75% of their income on accommodation. That is just not sustainable. As a result, they leave because we do not pay them properly and do not provide them with affordable accommodation.

To give another example, I was contacted in March - and the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, will be interested in this - by housekeepers and domestic cleaners in hospitals in University Hospital Limerick, Cork University Hospital and Letterkenny University Hospital. All of them said that these are the courses they have to study as cleaners: antimicrobial resistance and infection control hand hygiene; dignity at work; fundamentals of the general data protection directive; chemical safety in the workplace; putting on and taking off PPE in acute healthcare; introduction to children's first; manual handling and cybersecurity awareness, to name just a few. That is what you need to be able to keep our hospitals clean. We learned this during Covid-19. There was a re-evaluation exercise after Covid-19, and those workers did not get a re-evaluation. Therefore, they did not get any increase in their pay, which they are fuming about. We need to value workers and not put obstacles in the way of their being able to qualify. We must also treat workers who are often treated very badly a hell of a lot better than they are being treated.

Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity)
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I want to talk about the skill set of a group of workers who are doing vital work in our health service at the moment. I am referring to the 1,000 Indian nurses who came over here at the start of the year on two-year work permit programmes to work as healthcare assistants. They are not working as nurses, but as healthcare assistants in the private nursing homes in this State. I will leave aside the fact that there is a huge issue with family reunification. This State said to them that we wanted them, but did not want their kids, their partners, their husbands or anyone else coming here. This is forcing these people who are doing really difficult, stressful work in our health service to do it alone, while being separated from their kids and partners.

Leave that aside. On the question of skills, they are being told that at the end of the two years, they have to obtain QQI level 5. This is after they have been working for two years, and it is at a cost of up to €1,700 each and for a period of up to eight months, even though they already have the equivalent of a QQI level 5. In fact, their qualifications are quite a lot higher than that. They are nurses, not healthcare assistants. Why is the State forcing them to get these qualifications when they are overqualified for the position? If it is insisting on it, which it should not be, why is it forcing them to pay out of their own pockets rather than have the State pay for it itself?

Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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The Minister, Deputy Harris, informed me on my way into the Chamber that I might be at least partially to blame for this debate because I asked for it during oral questions in the Chamber earlier this year. If I am partially to blame, I am happy to bear that blame because this is a valuable debate to have, especially at the start of the European Year of Skills and in light of the launch of the OECD report yesterday, which, I have to admit, somewhat passed me by. I had to go back and have the executive summary printed off to have a look at it before speaking.

I attended a lecture at the then Coláiste Mhuire in 2004 or 2005, when I was engaged in the teacher training programme there. Ena Morley lectured in Coláiste Mhuire and went on to be principal at St. Ultan's Primary School in Cherry Orchard. I am usually fairly resistant to aphorisms, inspirational quotations and so on, but she said two things to our class group that year which have stuck with me ever since. She said that what had got us there would not be enough to keep us there, and that if we were not going forwards, we would go backwards. That was something I tried to bring into my teaching career. There is no doubt the primary school classroom I first entered in 2005 was an entirely different place from the classroom I left on entering the Dáil in 2020. What she said describes the modern workplace, whereby jobs and their requirements change all the time, as do the expectations we have of people. Whether it is through digitisation or, increasingly, through artificial intelligence, we are going to see greater and greater displacement of jobs that were traditionally white-collar jobs, which might not be as used to being displaced in the way Deputy Gannon described more blue-collar jobs as having been displaced in the past through automation.

As a result, we have to set our mindset differently in this country. I have always held that we provide formal primary and secondary school education very well in this country. Likewise, in tertiary education, our numbers hold up in OECD comparisons. I am not sure, however, that we do lifelong learning anywhere close to as successfully as we ought to do. The Minister mentioned Finland and Sweden as the top performers in this regard. I had a look on the EUROSTAT averages, from which we take these performance indicators, and Ireland is mid-table. Approximately 14% of our working-age population, that is, those between 16 and 64, had engaged in education within the preceding four weeks, or close to one in six people. The leaders in this field, Sweden and Finland, are at 35% and 31%, respectively. One in three people, or more, in those countries had engaged in further or continuing education during the preceding four weeks. As the Minister said, that is where we should be setting the bar. We should look to compete with the people at the very top. It would be a worthy goal to strive towards 30%, doubling our current figure.

Skills training, in its current form, is not actually what people often visualise when we talk about skills. Deputy Ó Laoghaire talked about what has been described at a meeting of the education committee as a cultural handbrake on apprenticeships, and I fully agree. It is something we have to overcome. Nevertheless, many of us, when we think of skills training, still think about that four-year apprenticeship model. In fact, modern skills training is much more about high-flexibility learning, micro-credentials, work-based learning and work-integrated learning, all of which are about supplementing and adding to a person's skills base. In that regard, I agree with what Deputy O'Reilly said about us needing to create a space within workforces and so on to have that protected time. That is important not just for employees but for employers as well. The modern workforce is much more mobile, and the retention of staff is increasingly an issue for employers. Increasingly, in my view, staff are going to expect to be able to upskill and train in that way, so it would be worth employers' while trying to carve out that space as well.

Other complications we have with this increased flexibility in provision include the fact more and more actors are active in this space, such as the technological universities, TUs, the education and training boards, ETBs, and Skillnet, as well as the likes of Enterprise Ireland coming in and co-designing courses with large-scale employers and talking to the TUs. One of the priorities within the OECD report relates to strengthening skills governance to build a joined-up skills ecosystem in order that there will be a proliferation of actors within this space. We need to ensure people are not at cross-purposes or competing for individual funding streams, and that the various actors within the space will talk to one another such that we will maximise the learning offering we are handing to people. This question of lifelong learning is about developing not just human capital but also social capital. I do not want to fall too far down the rabbit hole of talking about skills aimed directly at our workforce. We should also, in this European Year of Skills, be talking about what the Minister set us as a challenge, namely, for each of us to learn one new skill this year. I was going to recommend that the Ceann Comhairle work on keepy-uppies as his skill, although that might not be the most appropriate one. It is not just workforce skills; it might be that someone wishes to engage with Conradh na Gaeilge to brush up on the Irish language, for example. That might not be for any sort of workforce-related reason and could instead be for personal development.

There is an impediment for technological universities in the provision of post-primary teacher education. This harks back to the 1970s, when the Teaching Council established centres of excellence. There has been significant movement and growth in the university sector, and I am not sure about a determination made in the 1970s regarding where centres of excellence in education might lie. In the South East Technological University in Waterford, in particular, we have a strong track record of providing adult education, including Calmast, which specialises in science education.

The funding model is an issue in that I do not think we are really there yet in terms of how we fund lifelong learning. Increasingly, we are seeing that, with the increases in the cost of living, people are not self-funding for these short courses in the way they used to. This makes it challenging to provide course content. If a college relies on a given number of people to sign up and pay their fees to provide course content, and if people start minding their pennies and decide they are not going to take the course, be it in Gaeilge, retrofitting or whatever, it will be difficult to provide that course. Businesses, too, are asking questions regarding the National Training Fund, NTF. They are making contributions to it and are asking me why the fund is in surplus when we so badly need skills throughout the economy. As I said, the Minister put it up to us to learn one new skill this year. An idea is beginning to take root in France and Belgium, which are looking at this closely. It involves providing people with an allowance to engage with lifelong learning.

Would that not be a wonderful way to mark European Year of Skills? If the Government decided to part-fund each person who decided to engage in further or higher education, building on their own skills, that might be something that would mark the European Year of Skills in a real sense.

This may turn into a bit of a list of skills that we need within the new green economy which I know is one of the core focuses of the European Year of Skills. I have been engaging with people who are working in the offshore wind energy industry. There are a number of jobs and skills that will need to be developed in coming years as we seriously begin to develop our offshore renewable energy projects. This is just a list of jobs and I must admit I do not understand what half of these jobs are. A worker is required to engage in Global Wind Organisation, GWO, training as a minimum on top of their own trade or qualification. In the UK 90% of those training costs are covered. These training courses take about three weeks to complete.

The roles are wind turbine generator, WTG, assembly technicians; rope access technicians at level 2 and level 3; high-voltage technicians - I note that South East Technological University, SETU, is now offering this course; specialist painter-coater; hydraulic technician; riggers; slingers; banksman; crane drivers; blade technicians; store warehouse managers and workers; electrical engineers; mechanical engineers; non-destructive testing, NDT, welders; commissioning engineers and technicians; supervisors and project managers; quality assurance/quality control, QA/QC, engineers; contracts managers; planners; and works coordinators. That is a truncated list. If we are to develop our offshore wind and take advantage of the great offshore potential that we have, that is only the start of the list of new skills that we need to start providing in a serious way. We need to be engaging this workforce planning in a cross-departmental way, as recommended in the OECD report and we need to begin that planning now.

Martin Browne (Tipperary, Sinn Fein)
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The launch of the European Year of Skills is designed to put skills centre stage, helping people get the right skills for quality jobs and helping companies, in particular small and medium enterprises, and to address skills shortages in the EU. The Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science website outlines the key features of the OECD skills strategies which include developing relevant skills over the life course, using skills effectively in work and in society and strengthening the governance of the skills system. These ambitions are welcome given that, according to the OECD, participation in lifelong learning to facilitate essential reskilling and upskilling in Ireland, while above the EU average, falls far behind top EU performers.

While the Minister, Deputy Harris, has called on everyone to put skills at the centre for this year and to take the opportunity to learn a new skill, which I wholeheartedly agree with, there is obviously an imbalance between this and the delay in resolving the issues that adult education tutors highlighted at the gates of Leinster House last month. If we have tutors who consider themselves as being treated as third class citizens with no public service contracts, no recognition of qualifications, no incremental salary scale and forced into unemployment five times a year, how does that align with what we are talking about today? I ask the Minister to update us on that. Only this afternoon a tutor outlined to me how four weeks after the Minister's promise about their contracts another deadline has been missed. That tutor went on to explain how, in little over a month adult education tutors will again be forced to rely on social welfare for the summer months. This is that tutor’s 15th year facing this situation, and with the increased cost of living, her standard of living has been eroded even further. I ask for the Minister's response to this and to show some urgency.

The Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and Marine will today discuss proposals for a new school of veterinary medicine in Ireland. I note that expressions of interest have been submitted to provide increased availability of training and that those expressions are being assessed. One of the considerations is the development of such training at a regional level. This is clearly important, given the increased global demand for agrifood products in the future and increased demands for sustainable production methods, as well as addressing the issue of antimicrobial resistance. I acknowledge that the Department is working on meeting increased future demand for veterinary learning. Is consideration being given to just one regional learning space or will more than one base outside of UCD be considered?

The delivery of skills must be accompanied by a workplace that is attractive to work in. Health services are a particular case in point here. Children’s disabilities network teams have 4,953 children on their books, yet recruitment in this area is challenging to say the least, as is recruitment across the health sector. If we are to train our people in crucial skills that the workforce needs, we must do all we can to make future careers attractive enough for those graduates to stay here. That is the considerable challenge the Government needs to meet. I offer my support to the European Year of Skills and hope that the ambitions extend far beyond this year alone.

Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent)
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The focus of the European Year of Skills is lifelong learning. There is an old adage that education will set you free. That applies depending on where someone lives in the world today. It may ring true but what is indisputable is that onward education and learning deliver opportunities in terms of employment potential and the remuneration one can command.

The Department's report has highlighted some key observations. Ireland's participation in third level education is above the OECD average. Our participation in lifelong learning which is the basis of developing new skills and abilities, although above the EU average, does not rank us with the top-performing countries with which we are competing. It is a worthy goal that we should try to change that. Many Irish employers expressed concerns about the current skills gaps they see in various business sectors. This will get worse as the specialist areas of work advance and change. That is something we need to remediate.

A job for life does not exist anymore. We are all called on to improve our skill set and add to our learned capabilities if we are to remain truly productive and employable throughout our lives. This is largely related to the area of personal development, something that should be on the school curriculum. We need to start implementing personal development courses in national and secondary schools as part of the education syllabus.

Ultimately the report highlights the need for national policy to direct investment to creating opportunity for people to advance their training and learning regardless of whether they are in work or out of it. It is also a question of matching the right talents and abilities with skill sets that can deliver the best professional development of individuals. This will require a body of work in an economy like ours which is close to full employment. Access to further and onward skills and education is not always equally available, nor is it always promoted by employers who may want to see their employees develop their best work attributes but often do not wish to incentivise them to launch into a different career area resulting in such employers having to go back to recruitment agencies again.

EU social targets call for at least 60% of adults in training every year and at least 70% of these being in employment. These targets are frankly nuts. The current labour market participation rate in Ireland hovers around the 60% to 65% range. The latest obvious data from 2017 suggest just 8% of Irish adults participated in formal educational activity. In my own region, the south east, participation rates in the labour market and in formal education are lower than the national average.

If the Government is serious about achieving EU 2030 social goals, why do we have the continuing delay to invest in the South East Technological University, the only university in the south east? Why is there a delay in delivering to Waterford and Carlow campuses the academic buildings promised under a public private partnership, PPP, contract arrangement? As I have said in this House before, the Government had no problem giving the green light to PPP investments in universities in Dublin and Cork to the tune of €330 million in 2020. Why was the south-east region bypassed for such investment at that time? Did we think the skills shortage was not an issue in the region then?

The Minister and his Department have made a slow bicycle race of the purchase of part of the old Waterford Crystal site, a site identified by the Taoiseach in this House in 2020, a site that has been on the open market since 2017 and yet ongoing due diligence proceedings are slated to take up to the year end to complete. Does this mean that some in the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science require access to further skills development to achieve greater efficiency and speed in the delivery of their work?

We all know the world of work is changing and the challenges of an ever accelerating digital economy are coming into view very quickly and sharply. Artificial intelligence and robotics present some of the greatest challenges and possibly some of the greatest opportunities to countries that can successfully position their education to integrate, understand and best utilise this technology to create improvements in our social and economic environments. How should this best be done considering such skill sets will likely require all of the capability of university-based research and development in the State?

As the Minister of State will be aware, in the south east the three scientific gateways of the South Eastern Applied Materials Research Centre, SEAM, the Pharmaceutical and Molecular Biotechnology research centre, PMBrc, and the Walton Institute based in Waterford are some of the most advanced and successful of the 15 gateways in the country. They are individually and collectively very well placed to contribute to development and there is an opportunity for people from industry to engage in further education and be funded from the South East Technological University budget along with whatever research grant moneys they can win. They can be a considerable educational driver of the south-eastern region and the national economy. Where is the commitment from the Minister of State or his Department to deliver parity of esteem in third level educational spend to the new South East Technological University? I have not seen it written anywhere. I have not seen any Minister come into this House and make that statement on the Dáil record. Where within the Department's communications is exceptionalism cited for the region and the understanding that this region does not have the National University of Ireland to back up its third level educational output?

The comments by the Minister on his desire to see transformational learning opportunity delivered will make no sense in the south-east region without an equitable share from university funding disbursement and an acknowledgement by the Minister and the Government that the South East Technological University will have parity of investment with the universities and third level activity in other regions.

There are many challenges facing our national economy in the coming years. Ireland's ability to withstand the digital and demographic changes that will affect our society will be a function of our ability to continue to compete for international markets and international investment. The climate change challenge is also immense, yet Ireland can be a technology leader in this area if the policy steps that are required are implemented. That will also require an innovative and technically adept workforce. This is what we should now concentrate on delivering. None of this will happen without adequate investment in skills and education and in my region it will not happen without parity of investment in third level academia.

Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome Oli, who came from the United States to do some work experience with me, and her parents to the Public Gallery. I welcome her back to Ireland. It is great to have them here.

It is brilliant that so many young adults in Ireland have a degree. The statistics show we are significantly above the OECD average. Many Irish people, however, are falling behind because they do not have the right skills to thrive in their current employment and are unprepared for the changes in the world of work. We have seen massive changes in this regard and the rate of transformation will only increase. We must be ready. Many of us took the opportunity to learn a new skill during the pandemic. Now we must focus on this issue and concentrate on upskilling for Ireland to compete globally.

The European Year of Skills represents a call to action for Ireland to work together to address the global challenge, represented by the scale and pace of change in the world of work. Learning as we know it has changed to meet these challenges. We are all aware there are significant challenges ahead, with labour shortages, a slowdown in productivity growth and a need to successfully navigate the skills implications of the green and digital transformation of our economies, all the while dealing with the impact of population ageing. This last point has been brought to my attention several times. It is great that we are living so long but it also brings challenges. We also need to address that.

We are great at pursuing further education and we in Carlow have great further education institutions. The Minister of State will be aware that, as a Carlow woman, I am very proud of Carlow, which is now a university town and county. Carlow College, St. Patrick's, is a great college, which is seeking to fully integrate with the technological university. It has all of the capabilities and it has excellent students. The Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, is working on that issue with the Minister. I will return to that matter shortly.

The numbers of adults in Ireland pursuing lifelong learning to facilitate essential reskilling and upskilling, while above the EU average, falls far behind the top EU performers. This was also brought to my attention recently. I often hear from businesses in Carlow how concerned they are about labour skills gaps. We need significant investment in skills, including supports for management capabilities and the adoption of high performance work practices.

EuroSkills is an EU-wide initiative to ensure that people get the right skills for quality jobs and to help companies, especially small and medium enterprises, address skills shortages. This is an essential ingredient to ensure that SMEs across Ireland can increase productivity, innovation and competitiveness.

We have always been an island of learning and a country of creativity, skills that are crucial for the future world, both inside and outside of work. It is crucial for Ireland to participate in this. I have been told several times that our young people are global role models. As has been said, many good, young adults and teenagers are emigrating to other countries. We cannot allow this. We must ensure we are prepared and that we look after them, be they nurses or gardaí or in any other sector. I cannot mention one because I will forget others. We must ensure we have services, houses and proper pay. Ireland is a great place and a lovely place to live. It is known globally as having the best students in the world. We need to develop that. Historically, we have had a highly educated population. I see droves of students coming to Carlow to gain the enormous benefit of our further learning institutions. Our people are our gold. We must invest in that resource with money, momentum and ambition. We need more ambition. We should issue a call to action for everyone to step up and engage in this new era of learning.

I also highlight this issue as a mother. Some people want to go to college and others want to do apprenticeships. We must make sure we have everything in place. Our institute in Carlow is now a technological university and we have much to offer. The integration of St. Patrick's College Carlow into the technological university will allow us to offer apprenticeships and upskilling. We can do everything there. I have been in constant contact with the Minister of State and the Minister about this issue and I will continue to contact them. I ask the Minister of State to get back to me on it. In fairness, a lot of work has been done on the full integration of Carlow College into the technological university, but there is a lot more to do.

We have to make sure we look after our future. Adults and teenagers are our future. If people want to upskill and go back to school or college, we must make sure they can do so. The challenges are there and we need to work with everyone to give them the opportunity to access education when they need it. I look forward to seeing the report on the next steps, including the need to consider new legislation on skills. Perhaps the Minister of State will respond on that.

We must also look at the supports for businesses in this challenging environment. I can only speak about businesses in Carlow and Kilkenny, which have faced huge challenges. It is important we work with businesses. With everybody working together, we will find a solution. I am sure this will be very productive. There is a lot of good in this and I believe we can all learn from it.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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I must alert Members that this debate will come to a close very shortly.

Violet-Anne Wynne (Clare, Independent)
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I thank the Independent Group for allowing me time to join Members from across the House in making a statement on the European Year of Skills, which starts today.

I wish everyone in the House, at home and in County Clare a belated happy Europe Day 2023. Being part of a European family has been an essential component in making our workforce highly skilled and sought-after, providing for farmers in rural Ireland who are the backbone of the State and affording opportunities to our children to study and work wherever in the European Union they see fit.

The motto of the European Union, United in Diversity, is as true today as it always has been. A new school building in Ennis was opened by the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, before Christmas, for Ennis Community College and Gaelcholáiste an Chláir. It boasts a student body whose members speak more than 70 languages. EU membership has helped us to strengthen not just our trade but our culture.

As a country, Ireland has placed a high value on education and skills development. We have a proud tradition of producing highly skilled workers who are in demand all over the world. However, we cannot rest on our laurels. As the Minister of State will know, we must continue to invest in skills development if we want to remain competitive in a rapidly changing global economy. The European Year of Skills provides an excellent opportunity to focus our attention on this important issue. It highlights the need for individuals, businesses and governments to work together to develop and improve skills across Europe. It also recognises the value of digital skills and literacy, which are becoming increasingly important in today's age of digital and green transition.

I commend the recent work of the Minister and his Department on widening the scope of university admissions, where we are about to embark on an exciting pilot scheme of degrees without the need for CAO points. For far too long, we have discounted too many young people from many communities because of something as arbitrary as CAO points. Assessing people and deciding their futures on the basis of their character and ability, rather than a few highly pressured hours in a June classroom, is something about which I am very hopeful. I am particularly hopeful about the fact that the earmarked courses, such as those relating to construction management and nursing, are more vocational in nature, where a lecture hall will never replace the on-the-job training element of these essential careers and when we are also crying out for new entrants into these sectors. I am so excited by the prospect of this pilot. In particular, I cannot wait to see the impact of it on young lives in my constituency of Clare. Ennis is now a university town. This opportunity for Clare people to study and get a degree in their county town is a game-changer. I can tell the Minister of State that the west is wide awake.

On the topic of Ennis, I was delighted to join with my constituency colleagues in welcoming a huge group of transition year students from Ennis to Leinster House today, who exemplify exactly what we are speaking about. The students from St. Flannan's College, Ennis Community College, Gaelcholáiste an Chláir, Rice College and Coláiste Muire engaged with Ennis 2040 and Clare County Council on their sustainability visions for Ennis and presented their findings in the audiovisual room earlier this afternoon. To be quite honest, I was blown away by some of their suggestions and solutions. Some might say the Civil Service could learn something from the way these fantastic young people think in a solutions-based way. They looked at getting rid of the need for students to be dropped at schools by instead having drop-off points in certain parts of Ennis to help with the traffic backlog we experience there on a daily basis.

I also met with representatives of Migrant Nurses Ireland on the Leinster House campus yesterday. They shared with me the challenges they have been facing. Qualified people, mainly from India, are coming to Ireland under a permit-for-skills designation to work as healthcare assistants, HCAs, in the private nursing home sector. A key issue for this group of workers is not being able to bring close family members to live in Ireland with them because of the income limits when applying for family reunification visas. Their incomes are less than the HSE rates of pay for HCAs, which would allow them to apply. These workers, as we know, carry out crucial, stressful and emotionally draining work and are doing so without the support of their spouses and children. The income limit they are required to meet goes up by €3,000 per dependent. During our discussion, we looked at me as an example. If I were in that situation, with my family size of six children, I would have to earn nearly €20,000 more, every year, than what they are currently paid. Another important issue for this group, despite being qualified, is they are also required to undergo Quality and Qualifications Ireland level 5 training at a personal cost of €1,500.

Let us celebrate the European Year of Skills and recommit to the importance of skills development. Let us work together to ensure that our people have the skills they need to succeed. Let us continue to build a brighter future for all of us.

Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent)
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As an employer in the building skills profession, when I hear about the European Year of Skills 2023 I am delighted and think that the Government may finally be getting this right. Unfortunately, this is again not the case in Ireland. SMEs employ 1.1 million people here. These are companies that employ less than 250 employees. This initiative should be entirely focused on them.

Some 270 SMEs in Ireland are experiencing skills shortages, including in the areas of biomedical, chemical, electrical and engineering. There is also a huge shortage of skills in all aspects of healthcare. It is a similar situation in the construction business, where we are struggling to meet demand. What about the opportunity for the Government to promote, help upskill and retain staff in SMEs? Unfortunately, it is only focused on driving a green agenda. I spoke previously about starting apprenticeships for early school leavers in education following the junior certificate, where all their placements could be got locally within the SME sector. This also fell on deaf ears.

Education is not for everyone, but people should try to stay in school for as long as they can in order to get a basic education. As part of a process for dealing with early school leavers, I asked the Minister to look at introducing an apprenticeship model after the junior certificate. This would mean an apprenticeship could start after the junior certificate, which would equate to starting fifth year. Fifth and sixth year would be equal to one year of an apprenticeship but that one year over the two-year cycle would mean apprentices would have back-up from the school to get them through the exams they need to get. As they get a little older, at the end of two years they might decide either that they want to sit their leaving certificate or pursue their apprenticeship. Again, however, the Government is not looking at people who are early school leavers. As I said, education is not for everyone. I commend people who want to go to third level but for people who want to leave school early, I want to make sure back-up is there in the school that will encourage them to stay within the school, follow an apprenticeship model and, if they decide to continue with it, at least one year of their apprenticeship will be done. That would help in all these different sectors across the board, whether it is construction or any local SME business, as they would be upskilled.

The launch of European Year of Skills 2023 is good for some sectors but it should be focused more on SMEs to help and provide for these businesses. As I said, 1.1 million people are employed by SMEs but all the funding seems to go to larger employers. As someone from a rural area in County Limerick and an employer in construction - I have been in construction all my life - I can see the benefits of SMEs. They include our local shops, butchers, and different local businesses even, for example, Croom Medical. All these businesses would benefit from proper funding, infrastructure and skill sets.

There is a long way to go and Ireland has a lot to learn. The way we start should be with SMEs in this country because they are the most rounded and they understand everything within a local area. When you start with something like a foundation on the bottom, you understand everything and it can feed into the bigger skills we need to get to. We first need to start with the SMEs in this country, including farming or people from other areas who can learn from this. It has to start with the SMEs that employ 1.1 million people.

Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister, Deputy Harris, for his opening remarks and all the Deputies who spoke here today. As the Minister mentioned in his opening statement, this is an inflection point for skills in Ireland. The only constant is change. We can no longer treat knowledge as a fixed asset acquired during a certain phase of life nor expect that three or four years of study at tertiary level will equip us for working lives that last 30 to 40 years. Skills have an ever shorter shelf life. The average half-life of a skill, that is the time a skill is innovated, flourishes and then becomes irrelevant, is shortening all the time. It is approximately five years for all skills and two years for digital skills. In simple terms, something learned at work in the past two years will start to lose its value in the next few years and in fewer than ten years, it will have no value at all. The World Economic Forum estimates that we need to assess and improve our skill levels in the workplace every two to three years to keep up. We must all engage with this and become infinite learners.

There are many opportunities for everyone of all ages to engage with learning. We are working to bring higher and further education and research and innovation sectors more closely together to help us to deliver a seamless system that serves people. Examples include the unified tertiary system policy launched last year. The national tertiary office, which is jointly managed by the Higher Education Authority, HEA, and SOLAS, has been established and work is under way to develop 14 joint higher and further education programmes. The further education and training, FET, sector has undergone transformational reform since 2013. Future FET: Transforming Learning is a strategy that focuses on how further education provides pathways for a diverse group of learners and prepares people for successful careers and a lifetime of learning and development. We have advanced the development of targeted upskilling and reskilling initiatives designed to meet specific skills needs such as Springboard+ and catalytic pilots such as the human capital initiative which have brought industry and business together with universities to collaborate on cutting-edge emerging technologies and to advance our capabilities, capacities and competitive edge.

The micro-credentials policy is leading the development of a national framework for quality-assured micro-credentials. This will expand capacity for lifelong learning by helping learners and enterprises to find flexible, high-quality micro-credential courses appropriate to their skills needs. The microcreds.ieplatform will be launched later this month. The pilot, Recognition of Prior Learning, works to bridge an individual's abilities with opportunities in different contexts in employment; education and training; and their personal lives. We have made significant progress in transforming the higher education landscape in recent years with the creation of the network of five new technological universities. Their range of part-time, blended and distance learning pathways are backed by state-of-the-art digital connectivity.

In the area of research and innovation, people and skills lie at the heart of our implementation of Impact 2030: Ireland's Research and Innovation Strategy that was launched last year. The skills element is an important part of the national review of the State's support of PhD researchers. Skills are only one of four dimensions identified in Harnessing Digital, which is our whole-of-government strategy for digital transformation. Efforts are under way on basic skills, digital skills for the labour market as a whole, and high-level digital skills. Important work is under way to promote the skills specific to the green transition. This includes promoting new and emerging careers and roles, such as wind turbine maintenance technicians, and supporting workers in a range of sectors to upskill and learn new approaches to their work. The impact climate change will have on society means the skills required for the green transition are found more and more frequently in every workplace. To address this, SOLAS has established a construction and green skills programme office and launched the roadmap, Green Skills for FET 2021-2030.

The scale and range of work under way across the Government is breathtaking. It is all-encompassing in recognition by the Government that Ireland's skills ecosystem is a strategic national asset. Yesterday marked the conclusion of the Department's 15-month review and the launch both of the report OECD Skills Strategy Ireland and of the 2023 European Year of Skills. The year represents a call to action by President von der Leyen that governments and individuals should step up investment in themselves. This means recognising and realising a new chapter for a success story that is Irish education, a chapter of continuous learning via the Government working with education and training partners and providers and especially with business leaders. Let us collectively rise to the challenge of arming ourselves with the skills we need for the future. Let us put skills at the centre of our lives as a driver of our enterprise success and as a core tenet of our societal well-being. With the OECD review, the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science will be actively looking at strength and improvement areas, including looking at whether we have the correct legislative framework to underpin a truly 21st century learning and skills system.