I thank the Deputy and acknowledge his long-standing interest in this. The short answer is, yes, I will give consideration to this and work with the Deputy on it. To be eligible for a student grant, an applicant has to fulfil all of the criteria of the student grant scheme, including the residency and nationality criteria. In terms of residency, a student must be ordinarily resident in Ireland, the EU, the EEA, Switzerland or the UK for at least three of the five years before embarking on an approved third level co…

I accept the Deputy's frustration. This is an area where we have genuinely tried to do quite a bit of work as a Department over a significant period to improve the access opportunities for people through education who find themselves in Ireland through a variety of migration routes. We have made some good progress in that regard and I am proud of some of the increased supports we have put in place to help people access education and, crucially, get into the world of work and be able to make a living for themselves …

I am very happy to have a meeting with Deputy Gannon on the matter. I am happy to see if this can be considered and included in the new scheme. It will be included in the options paper, in terms of the cost of education measures we can take in advance of the budget. I am happy to have a meeting with Deputy Gannon and perhaps a constituent on this matter.

I thank my party colleague Deputy Burke not just for raising this matter but also for meeting with me on the issue. We had a really good engagement, which I will return to in a moment. Expanding the number of places available on health and social care profession programmes is a significant priority for my Department. It is so important for the delivery of healthcare services and cancer care to people throughout our country. Last year, I announced more than 400 additional permanent places on healthcare programmes fo…

The Deputy and I, and I think everyone in this House, will agree everyone wants all scanners in all hospitals to be used to their full capacity. There is not a family in Ireland who have not been touched by cancer. If we can provide the best use of the equipment in which this State has invested and empower the incredible professionals to work with that equipment by providing them with more colleagues, that is a good thing and it is something on which we should all bang our heads together to try to make progress. I …

The Deputy is entirely correct. There are two parts to this. We have to both train enough people and retain enough people in the health service and, obviously, issues of retention are for my colleague the Minister for Health. Nevertheless, I understand a local arrangement is in place between the HSE South/South West Hospital Group whereby the former provides support to diagnostic radiography students of about €5,000 per annum in return for the two-year commitment to which the Deputy referred. There is also a long-s…

As both Deputies Durkan and Bruton will be aware, the digital transition fund, administered by Enterprise Ireland on behalf of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, aims to increase the digitisation of all businesses in respect of products, processes, supply chains and business models. It seeks to help companies at all stages of their digital journey, from simply going online, in the first instance, to using digital technologies to develop new markets and business models. In recent months, my Departme…

The Deputy has asked an excellent follow-up question. On resources, we are increasing the budget of Skillnet Ireland, which is an incredible agency, massively. The budget of this organisation in 2017 was €18.2 million. In 2024 the budget is core funding of €41.4 million plus a further €10 million. We have gone from €18.2 million to €51.498 million between 2017 and 2024. Year on year we have been investing more in Skillnet to help it meet the training, upskilling and reskilling needs of business. The honest answer i…

I am very reluctant to give advice to business owners because I know how hard they work at the coalface. They have to make wage bills every week and month but I want businesses across the country to know that there is a suite of supports available and in place for them to help them, their business and their individual employees to upskill and reskill. We now have micro-qualifications available at Irish universities and through further education and training. There are many ways that people in work can access educat…

I thank the Deputy for his question, which highlights the importance of trying to align graduate output with our future workforce and skills needs. It is important, when we think of previous questions, that we do not just talk about the workforce and skills needs of the private sector, although that is really important, but we also talk about the workforce and skills needs of our public services. We discussed this with Deputy Burke earlier in the relation to the health service. Aligning outputs with the skills need…

I am not satisfied, and I cannot be, because I have a number of reports that show really acute skills shortages in key areas of the economy. We know that we will need 50,000 more people to work in construction by 2030 and around 17,000 people to work in retrofitting. Both of those numbers are really important for our housing and climate agendas. We also know that those numbers are likely to increase as housing targets increase. I can point to much good progress in terms of increased apprenticeships, new short cours…

I thank Deputy Burke for what is a really topical question. We are certainly doing a lot in this space, although whether we can ever do enough is a big question. The Deputy is right that this is certainly an area that we need to prioritise. One of the things we are trying to do is to dispel the myth that education is just something people do in primary and secondary school, with a couple of years at university to get a degree and then off they go. Increasingly, education is going to require people - even those who …

It is for this reason that we have changed our approach to student accommodation. In Deputy Durkan's constituency, for example, the town of Maynooth is one of the first beneficiaries of the new Government approach to student accommodation. We are investing taxpayer's money, along with university funding, to make accommodation projects viable. The student accommodation project in Maynooth to which I refer will go to construction this year and will make a real and meaningful difference. I am very satisfied that highe…

I thank Deputy Moynihan for the question. He is so right. Some of the biggest challenges we have involve increasing awareness and perhaps bringing about cultural and attitudinal change in regard to what we traditionally might have called the crafts, the trades or vocational education. I am committed to enhancing pathways for people after secondary school to try to move the conversation on, to show that there are different pathways to get a qualification and to emphasise that an apprenticeship is a real and substant…

That is a good question. While the answer is "Yes", those structures could be better. I recently met with the chairs of all our regional skills forums, almost all of whom are involved in businesses, to ask them to suggest what we can do at a regional level to reach out to businesses and make sure they have information around apprenticeships and the supports put in place by the Government to help employers, particularly small employers, to take on apprentices. As the Deputy knows, since January 2022, we have had an …

Yes. My Department, and most specifically our National Apprenticeship Office, are working tirelessly to try to grow a coalition of people to support and promote apprenticeships through engaging with parent councils, boards of management, trade unions, teacher union representative bodies and guidance counsellors. There is a legitimate issue here that we need to address. I have tasked the National Apprenticeship Office with coming up with ideas around this because I am critical of the league tables. However, I also t…

I thank Deputy Ó Murchú for his genuine support for the roll-out of programmes for students with intellectual disabilities, for his work on the Joint Committee on Autism, for attending our launch of the expansion of courses for students with intellectual disability, and for his tireless advocacy for personal assistants, which I also acknowledge. I want to recognise that. As the Deputy is aware, earlier this month I was delighted to be in a position to announce that ten higher education institutions have been awarde…

I also think we need to look at the SUSI Act. To be honest, whoever is the Minister and whoever is in government, it is too prescriptive to have this in primary legislation. If we look at the SUSI Act as compared with some of the social welfare Acts, the Minister for Social Protection, whoever he or she is, has a flexibility through regulation whereas, frankly, the primary legislation is too prescriptive for us to respond in real time to the issues that can arise. That is my view and it is something I would like to…

I want to specifically address this issue because I believe that when it comes to personal assistants, we need to have a consistency of approach throughout the country. I also believe we need to have real engagement with the Fórsa trade union, which has lodged a claim, which is the right and proper way to address this. The Deputy and I have talked about the issue of what we can do in the meantime, and I want to truthfully acknowledge that the Deputy has championed this. I have approved SOLAS to set an hourly rate o…

This is an excellent question. I am sure it is not because Deputy Bruton does not intend to seek re-election to the Dáil and has announced his retirement that he is looking to know if he can play a role. There would be nobody better to play a role in our education system because we have certainly learned from him here. This question gets to the very heart of the ageism that exists in society, of which there are so many examples, as we all know. I think we all agree on this. There are so many arbitrary ages that hav…