National Training Fund (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-11 ============================================================ Dee Ryan (FF), Nominated by the Taoiseach I welcome the Minister. It is great to have him back in the House again. I also welcome this Bill. I have heard the Minister speak many times since he took up his office and I have always been struck by how familiar he is with his brief. There is such rich tapestry of things happening within it. Hearing him speak again this morning I am struck by how much the Government appreciates and understands the link between our higher education sector, our skilled workforce and our economy and how funding and ensuring we put money and investment into our knowledge economy will allow us to do all of the other things the public wants us to do in terms of special needs assistants, healthcare, housing and infrastructure and all of the good work we are rightly focused on delivering. It also struck me how synchronised things are across government and how there is a whole-of-government approach to ensuring we drive on in delivering for the people while ensuring we develop a sustainable economy. I am very pleased to support the Bill, which responds to a very practical challenge. While we can fund courses and programmes through the NTF, the existing legislation, as the Minister rightly pointed out, restricts us in the context of supporting the provision of many of the facilities and equipment those programmes require. We simply cannot train an engineer, a robotics technician, healthcare assistant or an apprentice in 2025 with outdated tools and buildings. This Bill ensures that the capital investments, whether they are refurbishments, retrofitting, decarbonisation works or accessibility improvements, are funded and that safeguard is hardwired into the legislation. It also allows certain research and core HE funding to be supported when it clearly strengthens the skills base. I commend the work on the work the Minister has done in liaising with the different stakeholders in the interest groups. When this was first mooted a number of months ago, there was concern from the business community because this is the money it had built up, the fund it had contributed to and the question was what would happen to it? I had very few of those communications coming to me and very little of that concern was expressed to me in the past week as I prepared to meet the Minister today. The Minister has done well in the important work of communicating on this Bill with our partners and stakeholders. If I may, I want to focus for a moment on Limerick. I know the Minister is very familiar with Limerick because he visited us a number of times since he took up office. I want to highlight one example that perfectly illustrates the possibilities the Bill will present. It is the Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, CRIS, at the University of Limerick. I know he had a briefing on it. I have had multiple briefings on it. Our colleague Deputy Cathal Crowe is passionate about the strong work that it does. When the Taoiseach was in Limerick some weeks ago, he had a private briefing on the work this group does. It is a leading centre for robotics, automation and intelligent sensing systems. The work that it does is very focused on marine surveillance - underneath the ocean, on the water and in the air. It develops its own drones, autonomous boats and autonomous submarines but it also buys in some and customises them. The centre has all of the technology and systems developed in its base in UL in Limerick whereby it can monitor in real time the work those autonomous instruments are doing anywhere in the world. The centre has partnered in its work with the Garda, the Coast Guard and the Navy here, and with other important state bodies around the world. There is huge potential and demand for the skills it is developing in the offshore wind sector and in our security and surveillance sector. It is also involved in the designated maritime area plans, DMAPs, work that has to be done to ensure we unlock the potential from the west coast. This type of technology is crucial in that regard, so it is very much in demand. The centre is doing all of this incredible work – researching, developing PhD students and working with the various institutions to help train their in-house staff - from a tiny laboratory facility; the same one it started with 20 years ago in UL. This is an example of an absolute gem of a skill set that we are developing, which is highly specialised, hugely in demand and will be going forward, and the fund could potentially facilitate the centre to develop its facilities. That really brought to life for me what the Minister is trying to do here. Centres like CRIS require highly specialised equipment and modern facilities. That is what the fund is for. This amendment corrects the current position and ensures that places like UL can continue to innovate, expand and train people using the tools that industry requires today. CRIS is not alone. Significant work is being done in the Limerick campus of the Technological University of the Shannon, TUS. It is delivering apprentices that we badly need across the construction sector, working in renewable energy, construction technologies and digital systems year-on-year. These programmes need modern workshops. The Minister is very familiar with this. The LCFE on Mulgrave Street in Limerick is an excellent centre that draws many school leavers and does wonderful training with them. Again, the facilities are older and we would love to upgrade them, modernise them and potentially it may be able to apply for those facilities through the NTF. Ireland's success has always rested on the strength of our talent pipeline. We are competitive, not because we are the cheapest, but because we have the workers who can adapt, learn, retrain and thrive in fast evolving industries. The NTF's income has grown, as the Minister mentioned. It is right that we are ensuring that this fund can be fully and responsibly deployed for the purposes for which it was created. This Bill does that. It protects the fund's objectives. It tightens the link between spending and skills, and it gives us the flexibility to use the fund in a way that makes sense in 2025. This amendment is modest in form but significant in impact. It ensures that workers, apprentices, learners and jobseekers across the country get the very best chance to develop the skills our modern economy demands. The Minister has seen the potential on the ground. He has seen the ambition of the institutions to deliver more, and he knows what is possible when we match that ambition with the right legislative tools. For these reasons, I am very pleased to support the National Training Fund (Amendment) Bill. I encourage colleagues across the House to do likewise. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-12-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:27+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-11