Feargal Quinn (Independent)

Of course. I also welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Kelleher, who was a Member of the House for the first five years I was here. It is great to see him back here. I found the Minister of State's speech, and the two other speeches, very useful, particularly the positive attitude of Senator John Paul Phelan and the experience of Senator Mary White and the way she speaks from the heart.

I approached Senator Mary White last year when I was invited to South America to make a speech to see if she could help me with a book her husband and former Minister Ray MacSharry had written. It was a fascinating book, just as it was a fascinating challenge to explain the Irish success story to people in South America. One of the reasons for that success I found in that book and from own experience was social partnership, a crucial area. In preparing my thoughts, I was aware of the benefits we have had and the success we have enjoyed and hope we can continue that in the future.

I do not believe in re-inventing the wheel and, therefore, I will rely heavily on a recent report by the expert group on future skills needs on the very topic we are debating today. First of all, I pay tribute to the excellent work of this body, and the foresight of those who set it up. It embodies precisely the kind of forward thinking we urgently need in this country but too often it is a need we ignore. In this case our fault is different — we have the thinking, and the conclusions from the thinking, all set out clearly before us but we, for the most part, ignore it when discussing the subject.

In preparing this report, "Tomorrow's Skills: Towards a National Skills Strategy", the expert group carried out detailed research to underpin the development of a national skills strategy. This included the identification of the skills required for Ireland to develop over the period to 2020 as a competitive, innovation-driven, knowledge-based, participative and inclusive economy. Those words are very similar to those in the Lisbon strategy that set out what Europe is trying to achieve, "to become the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth, with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion." If Europe is trying to achieve that for all member states, we must recognise we are competing against other European economies that are looking at what happened here.

There are three steps along the road to the conclusions the expert group reaches. First, it identifies the skills we need for Ireland to make the transition to the kind of economy we want to have by 2020; second, it makes projections of the labour force's skills profile we will need to make the transition to that kind of economy and, crucially, compares that ideal profile with the one we will have if we continue as we are at present; and third, it outlines the training and education objectives where gaps and deficiencies are clear between the desirable situation and the likely supply. After all this careful research, its conclusion is clear — we cannot get to where we want to be simply by carrying on as we are.

That is the bad news. The good news, however, is that we can get to where we want to be if we put in place the right training and education objectives. There is still time for us to achieve our aspiration towards leadership in the knowledge society, but only if we roll up our sleeves and focus our national efforts on what we need to do.

The headline conclusion and recommendation in this report is that sustained and enhanced investment in the educational and training infrastructure is essential to our economic and social development. It therefore reinforces a point I have been making repeatedly in this House in recent months, namely, that our number one national priority must be to invest more — much more — in our education system, and to maintain and sustain that investment consistently over the next decade at least.

This report tells us that employees in all jobs will be increasingly required to acquire a range of generic and transferable skills, including people-related and conceptual/thinking skills. Work will be less routine, with a requirement for flexibility, continuous learning and individual initiative and judgment. Science, engineering, ICT and research and development skills are an integral part of a knowledge-based economy and their promotion remains important. Importantly, however, the report stresses that all occupations will become more knowledge-intensive. In many cases, this will result in a rise in the requirement for qualifications and technical knowledge.

Part of the problem is that we have an exaggerated impression of how our education system does when pitted against the rest of the world. Far from being ahead of the pack, as we are sometimes inclined to believe, we are behind on most of the key benchmarks that are used to measure investment and achievement in education. In 2004, only six out of 27 OECD countries had a worse performance than Ireland in terms of the percentage of the labour force who had only attained up to lower secondary qualification.

Looking forward to 2020, the report identifies clearly the gap in qualifications levels that will exist. I refer to what is called the national framework of qualifications, NFQ. I am sure the Minister of State knows that TLA stands for a three letter acronym and NFQ is such a TLA that I like to use.