Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and thank him for his comprehensive presentation of the Government's policy in this regard. Fianna Fáil supports the proposed Bill that will formally change the name of FÁS to SOLAS and welcomes the extended role it will play in providing for oversight and direction for the further education sector. Like FÁS, SOLAS will play a crucial role in meeting the skills requirements of the economy in the years to come.

In yesterday's edition of TheIrish Times Brian Mooney published a comprehensive analysis of the key areas of the new structures in further education. He makes the point that they need to serve learners and employers, not trainers and agencies. A couple of key questions arise from this analysis. The Minister of State has touched on some of them, for example, "There is still enormous duplication of courses regionally, both within the PLC sector and between it and the parallel FÁS training system. There are currently 180,000 further education and 75,000 training places provided in FÁS training centres ... Do the teaching staff within the further education and FÁS training services have the skills to educate and train people to the high standards required by multinational and domestic employers, particularly in ICT, foreign language skills, international business, engineering and technology?" He makes a valid point because while the job announcements made in the past couple of months are very welcome, it is obvious that a significant number of staff are being sourced overseas, primarily because people with the skills required, particularly in the IT sector and language skills, do not seem to be available here. It is a worrying trend that while jobs are being created here, they do not seem to be making a significant dent in the overall unemployment figures. This is a shifting model and people are rotating in and out regularly, but the unemployment rate of 14.6% remains stubbornly high for several years. Obviously, this is an issue of great concern to the Government. Will those who are educated and trained meet the needs of those who are creating jobs?

There also seems to be a trend to award a growing share of the budget to private sector colleges and trainers. Other questions arise in this regard. For example, the Minister of State talks about integration which will have to happen between FÁS trainers and the vocational teaching sector, but FÁS trainers enjoy higher pay scales than teachers and do not enjoy anything like the same holidays. Does the Minister of State have a view as to how these two groups of public servants could be integrated into a single service under the management of the proposed ETBs because obviously there is a need for 24-7, year round involvement?

Other questions arise in spite of what the Minister of State has outlined. There has been a significant number of budget cuts in the sector. For example, the pupil-teacher ratio is rising from 17:1 to 19:1, which will result in the loss of 200 whole-time equivalent teaching posts, which must have some impact on training. The training allowances for further education and training scheme participants are reduced, with the result that participants in VTOS, Youthreach, FÁS and further training programmes who move from jobseeker's payments will no longer have their new payments increased to a maximum of ¤188 per week in cases in which their jobseeker's allowance is lower. This is a disincentive. The allocation to the VECs has been reduced by ¤13 million in the budgetary proposals. The ¤300 cost of education allowance payable to back-to-education allowance participants is to be discontinued. These cuts are bound to impact on the Government's very genuine aspirations that the Minister of State outlined and these questions need to be addressed.

On apprenticeships, Mr. Brian Mooney writes: "During the boom we developed a system of apprenticeship training that was convoluted, expensive and served the needs of FÁS rather than of employers and trainees." It is interesting to note that during a time of high employment, the Celtic tiger years, the FÁS budget was in excess of ¤1 billion per year, an extraordinary amount of money. The collapse of the construction sector created enormous difficulties, particularly for "some students, caught in the middle of their four-year apprenticeship cycle here, to complete their training in the UK." This was facilitated by FÁS. It is interesting that Mr. Mooney draws attention to the fact that "The move revealed an anomaly in our training model; these students were brought to full qualification in just four months in the UK."

A lengthy Irish apprenticeship model was designed, as he put it, to provide years of employment for FÁS trainers, which was wasteful and made no sense whatever. The Minister of State has outlined this under various headings, and there are so many that one could do a thesis on what each heading will achieve. The Minister of State has so many headings in his presentation that he should be complimented on having an understanding of them all.

I hope these questions will be addressed, and as the Minister of State has correctly indicated, the integration of the vocational and training sector under the new education and training boards, ETBs, is a challenge. We will discuss that when the Education and Training Boards Bill comes before the House. That will create a new environment that will challenge all the providers.

The Minister of State indicated that SOLAS will not deliver the programmes and its key function will be to provide strategic oversight and funding to the main deliverers - the ETBs - and where appropriate, the private sector. In the mid-1990s, the National Economic and Social Forum considered a report published about local employment offices, with the idea being that gaps in jobs would be identified in regions, with those who were unemployed being interviewed, profiled and put into either training programmes or jobs. Is that an element of the Minister of State's proposals and will there be an integrated approach going to the core of the unemployed?

There will be difficulties in the regions, where there is an increasing imbalance. Most of the job announcements we have seen over the past couple of years have tended to come in clusters along the east coast, Cork and Limerick. As I come from the west and north west, like the Minister of State, I am concerned about this difficulty. The Government cannot be blamed for this. I spoke with somebody in the IDA recently about the regional imbalance and the lack of visits by the organisation to various counties in the north west and western seaboard as distinct from visits to the eastern counties. It seems that companies considering Ireland make a decision to go where there are population clusters and do not go where they will not be able to avail of skills. Nevertheless, there are a number of multinational companies in my own part of the world, including Bank of America MBNA, which is located in Carrick-on-Shannon and provides over 1,000 jobs. There has never been a difficulty in filling those jobs. Abbott in Sligo is a pharmaceutical company and there is no difficulty in filling jobs. Fruit of the Loom was originally in Donegal and commercial considerations saw it fail rather than a lack of labour availability.

Does the Government have any input in this area? Astonishingly, the person from the IDA told me that some companies take the view when considering the global market for job locations that if it is out of Dublin, it is out of Ireland. That was the term used. In other words, if the company is unable to locate in Dublin's conurbation, it will not locate in Ireland at all. That is astonishing when we consider that we are selling the country's advantages, including a very impressive corporation tax rate and a highly-educated, English-speaking labour force. It seems that when companies consider Ireland, they do not appear to countenance the provinces or regions.

I know the Government cannot force companies to provide jobs to those regions overnight by magic and multinationals have people to make their decisions. Nevertheless, there must be a meeting of minds and the Government must try to grasp the particular difficulty that exists. Increasingly, there will be a drift in the population to the east coast, and that is already happening. One can see it in demographic analyses and political landscapes that are changing, particularly in light of the new proposed council structures. The Minister of State may have a view in that regard.

I appreciate that when the Government officials sit down with industrialists or those thinking of locating in Ireland, we welcome the jobs, no matter where they are. I do not want to give the impression that I begrudge jobs being placed in Louth, Dublin, Cork or Limerick. The regional imbalance is creating enormous social difficulties and will affect the fabric of our society in the west and north west.