Artificial Intelligence
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-16
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Peter Burke (FG), Longford-Westmeath

We are working very closely with all our skills partners and enterprise agencies to ensure training is being delivered in the key sectors that are at risk, namely, graduates, as well as particular cohorts of the employment market like ICT, professional services and legal and financial services. We have a huge amount of skills upgrading to do in those areas. Take the IDA for example. We set out an ambition to train 40,000 people over the four-year strategy and in year one we have hit 33,000. That demonstrates the capacity and training we are doing. There is also a huge amount of opportunity. It is not a period of decline for the labour market but a period of transition in which old functions will change and new opportunities will emerge. Take, for example, our high-performance growth unit in Enterprise Ireland. Of 196 new businesses this year, half of them are grounded in AI. That shows the opportunity there. We are working with the expert group on future skills. Our new national skills observatory, which will be profiling and matching the skills and work our skills partners will be doing, has been established. We will have our AI office up and running from 1 August and it will be building capacity and ensuring our citizens are fully trained to grasp the opportunities that are presented.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:50+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-16