Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As a former Member of this House, I was often concerned about Ministers who, on having delivered their opening address and listened intently to the debate, delivered a closing address without addressing any of the issues raised during the contributions. I will try as best I can not to allow that to happen in this instance, bearing in mind that I have but five minutes. A number of common themes and trends arose in the discussion. If I do not mention individual contributions, I hope Senators will not feel slighted.

One reason the process of reform is under way to bring together the further education and training sectors is to be able to leverage the very significant existing skillsets that exist in both sectors. There is no question but that decades of experience and thousands of hours of teaching and training expertise have not been used to their best effect in the past. The word "duplication" was mentioned time and again. It is very much the case that there has been duplication. It is a waste of valuable State resources and people's time.

We must convince people that our intervention to get them back into the learning process will be very worthwhile. It should not be a case of simply crunching the numbers and not really caring about the overall outcome of the process. It is a matter of bringing together the various strands.

Senator Zappone mentioned the community sector. I have visited at least 30 to 40 community and education projects across the country. Significant expertise at community level is, more often than not, offered voluntarily owing to the goodwill and passion of people who have skills and want to impart them to others. It is a matter of bringing together the various strands, including the further education sector, the work FÁS has been doing, the community sector and the private sector, which is also doing exceptional work.

Most of the recent 6,500 places offered through the MOMENTUM programme had been provided by the private sector. In the past, that sector had flexibility. In a recent piece in one of the national newspapers, I compared FÁS with a behemoth of an ocean liner and stated the new structure we are trying to create will comprise the ETBs, which will move powerboat-like to various areas whose skills shortages need to be addressed urgently. The private sector has been very good at this in the past because it has small, tightly-controlled units capable of moving quickly to address particular skills shortages. We will bring together all the various strands, and the best of every one of them will come together to make the system work better for the people we want to support.

Senator Hayden stated we need flexibility at regional level. We certainly will have it. This is why I said in my contribution that SOLAS, as an entity, will not be providing any training or further education opportunities. Rather, it will be charged with ensuring that all 16 ETBs across the country will have the skills, resources and support necessary to deliver training and education locally.

Some significant national research will be taking place. Senator Ó Domhnaill stated we need to look forward ten to 20 years. SOLAS will be doing so and will have a dedicated research unit, as FÁS does at present, to do the kind of work required and determine where skills shortages are emerging.

Senator Quinn mentioned that the careers 65% of children entering primary school now will have do not even exist. I saw an article in a magazine stating that there are now 300,000 people in the US employed writing Apps for iPhones and iPads. I read in another magazine that by 2025, half of the careers which will exist then do not exist now. We must be able to respond to that constantly emerging, innovating jobs market.

SOLAS will do that research at national level but the ETBs will also be required to do research at regional level and to drill right down in a very granular fashion to establish where the skills shortages are occurring. For example, in Galway where I live, there is a huge emerging medical devices cluster. In fairness, FÁS and the VECs are working to respond to those skills shortages, even before SOLAS has come into being. We see similar things happening in the pharmaceutical and food sciences area in Cork and in the financial services area in Dublin. We need to be that speed boat-like model that can move quickly to respond to skills shortages as they occur and not be running behind the curve. We should be ahead of the curve all the time.

Senator Quinn spoke very eloquently about the whole subject of entrepreneurship, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. In addition to teaching the subject of entrepreneurship to our children and young adults, we need to somehow interweave the concept of entrepreneurship across all of our education provision. Last week I spoke to a very successful businessman based in County Galway who said that when he was doing his leaving certificate, he had to respond to a questionnaire on what career one wished to pursue when one left school. He put down that he wanted to be a businessman but the teacher handed it back to him and said that was not a career. That kind of mindset needs to be changed, although I think it is changing.

The skills one needs to become a successful entrepreneur - critical thinking, team working, analytical skills, being able to see opportunities where others do not and learning to learn, which Senator Quinn and others mentioned - need to be very much part of all our education provision right from junior infants to PhD level. We are trying hard to do that.

It was mentioned that students are coming from all over the world to study entrepreneurship in Dundalk IT. They are going to other institutions as well. I was in DCU last week saying "Goodbye" to 15 Malaysian teachers who had come from the Malaysian education system to study entrepreneurship in Ireland. We are leading the way globally in this area and are doing exceptionally good work in many areas, but we need to do a lot more.

SOLAS is about bringing together all of our expertise and our wonderful history of education in the different sectors and using that expertise to provide people with a clear, unambiguous and seamless transition all the way through the education system, so that they can see a definitive path for themselves from the moment they enter it until they hopefully re-emerge at the very end and take up sustainable, long-term, satisfying and rewarding careers.

I agree with Senator D'Arcy who said that as well as those who are unemployed, those who are employed need to be equally careful about keeping their skills up to date and we need to be able to facilitate that through the process. We will talk a lot more about this when the ETB and SOLAS legislation comes back to the House.

As a small island nation off the coast of Europe, we sometimes tend to think we need to look elsewhere for inspiration on how to do things properly. Scandinavia, Austria and Germany are often mentioned as being a wonderful models but I genuinely think if we pull together all the strands and all the talent and passion, which I have seen in this sector over the past two years, and really make them gel and work well, we can become the model others look to for inspiration. We have much important work to do and I look forward to working with Members to make it happen.