Further and Higher Education Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11 ============================================================ James Lawless (FF), Kildare North Absolutely. The opportunity that Cavan provides was very evident on the day of my visit. There is a great opportunity to continue to expand educational provision there on site at the Cavan Institute. That would be encompassed by the college of the future programme, which I am working out through the national development plan. I am examining progress on that at the moment but I would be confident that will be one of the projects that will do well from the fund. On the all-island dimension, I was pleased to be able to announce the collaboration between Queen's University Belfast and Dundalk Institute of Technology very recently. I spoke to both colleges a number of times in relation to this and I am very keen that we advance that expeditiously. There is ambitious programme shared by both colleges. It is fair to say that the reaction to the first all-island university has been extremely positive and strong across the board. That all-island dimension to education and our schools is so important. --- 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/dail/2025-12-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-11