Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Children as young as five learned to code and listened as spacewoman, Norah Patten, an aeronautical engineer who hopes to be the first Irish female astronaut to fly to the moon, said that if something seems impossible, that does not mean one should not try. Learning to rob a bank in the virtual world taught these children about privacy, passwords, consequences and teamwork. Local children and children from all over the world participated in this event. They were joined by thousands of coders, parents, students and volunteers, who came together to promote this global movement and the message that technology has benefits for children and for inclusion.There is a strong need in industry in Ireland for better computer science skills and higher numbers of graduates but despite the presence of high-tech multinationals, there is no computer science education in second level and as a result there is a shortage in the high-tech sector of applicants with advanced skills.

Learning data and computer languages are like learning a foreign language in that the younger one starts, the better. This is one reason the Government's only initiative, a capitation top up to third level institutions for each computer science graduate it churns out, has been a failure. This is because it is so much harder to take up computational learning at a late stage. The low supply of computer science graduates has led to significant wage inflation in the sector which has a particular negative effect on our homegrown tech sector. The high salaries offered to computer science graduates cannot be matched-----