Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to see the Minister, Deputy Harris, here for this Commencement matter this morning. I will start by telling him about my own education. I had my primary education in County Tyrone. I passed my 11-plus and went to grammar school for one year in Donaghmore convent. Then I came south and went to secondary school for the full six years in the South and then I went up to Queen's University Belfast for my degree. That is an all-island education. I went to university in 1997, so it was before the Good Friday Agreement.

We have to recognise there has been a failure in the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement over 25 years if there is now less student mobility than there was then. In my family, I am the youngest of five. We were in County Tyrone when the other four chose their universities. One went to Queen's, one to Ulster University, one to Manchester University and one came to Dublin to UCD. That was reflective of the choices and the patterns that were there at the time. It is incredibly frustrating to know that it is now harder, not easier, to study across the Border. We have taken away the Border but there are actually more barriers, not fewer, in accessing each other's education systems.

I know that from the research we have just seen from the ESRI. Just 0.6% of students in the South are from the North. In Northern Ireland just 2.4% of students come from across the Border. In real numbers, 1,255 students from the North attend university in the South at the moment and a measly 1,170, which is less overall, have gone north. That compares with 4,000 students in the South who have gone to Britain and then 13,685 Northern Irish students who have gone to England, Scotland and Wales. The mobility at third level at this moment in time is pitiful compared with what it could be.

No one can deny the Minister's commitment to reforming the CAO or the shared island vision for education. To summarise some of that, the Minister is changing how people can access degree courses outside of the CAO, is introducing cross-Border apprenticeship programmes, has established the Atlantic Technological University in the north west, with growing links to Derry and investment of €45 million in the Magee campus, and has provided access to places in Northern Ireland for people to study medicine, with opportunities for those students then to take up internships in the HSE, 200 new nursing places in the North this year, and 50 places in therapy disciplines for occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and physiotherapists that students in the South can access. He has seen through the promise to keep the Erasmus programme for Northern Ireland students, which would have been a travesty of Brexit, and overseen €40 million of shared island North-South research funding, of which this ESRI funding is part. I know he is committed to this.

I just want to mention the Secondary Students' Union of Northern Ireland, SSUNI, and the practical issues. It is the norm in the North to do three A-levels, not four. It is required to do four here. To get maximum points here, not three but four A-stars are necessary, including maths and most likely a foreign language, even though the system just is not there in the North to support foreign languages. There are practical issues that could be addressed, including the lack of guidance for students in the South accessing the United Kingdom accreditation service, UKAS, system and students from the North accessing the CAO. I hope the Minister can update us on his plans to reform this.