2026-05-27

I will start the debate by reflecting back on 100 years ago. The 1926 census digitisation recently emerged and it showed a very different Ireland. It is worth reflecting on the journey that we have travelled in that 100 years. Before I get into that, though, I hope the House will indulge me a brief personal note. Had I not been performing parliamentary duties today, I would have been attending my grand-aunt, auntie Alice's 100th birthday this afternoon where she is celebrating her party in a nursing home in Mallow with friends and family. She featured in that 1926 census as a very young infant. It is worth reflecting of that. I wish her a happy birthday and to family members who are joining her for that celebration today. She is a proud daughter of Dunmore East and now a resident in Mallow. That century of life and the journey that we have all taken in that time in my own family and Ireland as a nation - the journey of our societal progress and economic growth - very much mirrors the topic of today's conversation, which is about skills, training, talent and research. If we look back at the census, it tells us that, in 2026, when my grand-aunt Alice was born, it was a country of 3 million people. It was overwhelmingly rural. At the time, more than half the workforce was employed in agriculture or manual labour. Only a very small proportion - less than 3% or 4% - worked in what would be considered today as professional or technical occupations. Higher education was out of the reach of most families and emigration shaped the horizon of too many young people. Yet within the span of that single lifetime, Ireland has transformed itself. Through education, economic modernisation and openness to new ideas, we moved from the margins of Europe to being one of not only Europe's but the world's leading knowledge economies. Today, we face another major transition. The forces shaping this century are different in form but similar in magnitude to those of the previous century. Once again, our success will depend on how effectively we prepare our people for our skills systems and prepare our economy for change that will continue to come at us. Change is the only constant in life. We cannot shy away or shield from it, but what we can do is embrace change, prepare for it and roll with it in being agile, versatile and responsive across our skill and training systems. I very much welcome today's discussion as an opportunity to set out some of the objectives and achievements of my Department to date, some of the challenges that Ireland faces at this time of change and how we can respond. I look forward to listening to colleagues around the House on their contributions on the same theme. I will start by raising what we often refer as the four Ds that summarise the challenges facing Ireland and much of world today. The four Ds are demographics, digitalisation, decarbonisation and deglobalisation. Ireland has benefited enormously from foreign direct investment, FDI, and globalisation for decades, going back to Lemass and Whitaker's embrace of FDI and opening up of Ireland as a global trading economy, which had huge dividends and continues to do so on a large scale. However, resilience and indigenous growth require deeper capability domestically, including companies that are capable of scaling, innovating and competing internationally. Skills, research and innovation policy are central to building that capacity. Although our employment levels remain high and our unemployment levels remain low, we can never be complacent about the increasing challenges that are undoubtedly coming at us. As everyone in the Chamber is aware, Ireland has entered a period of profound transition, driven by four independent but interdependent global disrupters, namely, the four Ds. Population growth, combined with ageing, will fundamentally reshape Ireland's labour supply and workforce composition going forward with several implications for skills needs over the coming decades. I was at an event this morning, which was a skills roundtable that my Department held with the construction sector. One of the presentations referred to how today we had four working aged people for every one person in retirement. By 2050, we will have two working aged people for every person in retirement. That is a celebration of our health service and longer lifespan, but it also shows the scale of the challenge in supporting people living longer and healthier lives, the healthcare needs that go with that and the demographics of a changing population. In tandem, the economy is having to constantly evolve to accommodate the rapid pace of the second D, digitalisation. That includes AI, quantum, the Internet, social media, smartphones and all the technologies that pervade our lives and we have come to take for granted but that continue to change at scale. They are also pivotal to the Irish economy and technology sector in Ireland, employing roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people directly. We are home to many of the major global giants that drive on those technologies. The reality is that the impact of AI is becoming more visible with each passing day, even if we still do not understand its full implications. Only last week, we saw job losses being announced by Meta and Covalen, reminding us just how quickly the landscape can shift and bringing darker clouds onto the horizon. While these changes are driven by many factors, there is a growing recognition that technological change, including AI, will play an increasingly important role in shaping the future of work over the decade ahead. Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly and unfortunately displace some tasks and reshape parts of the labour market. Equally, though, it will create new industries, professions and opportunities. The question for Ireland is whether we can position ourselves as passive consumers of these technologies and watch them come at us or we want to be active participants in shaping and building the future and embracing and leading the adoption of technology. Responding to AI cannot simply mean reacting to disruption after the fact. Ireland must aim to become one of the most AI-capable workforces in Europe. To support this, I recently launched a platform called aiready.ie, which is a new national initiative with the mission to upskill 1 million people to develop practical AI skills and learning over the years ahead. The objective of the initial phase, which is now live, is to ensure that everybody, including workers, consumers and pensioners, can confidently use and benefit from AI technologies in their daily working lives. I encourage all Deputies to log on and complete the training. All of this is happening at a time of extraordinary geopolitical uncertainty sparked by a series of wars, supply chain disruptions and protectionist policies. Many of these factors are further shaped by ongoing efforts within the European Union to move to climate neutrality, which is a necessary transition that is bringing significant change to economies and labour markets. Our decarbonisation agenda demands our energy supply, energy grid and our entire renewable energy sources to be fully explored and utilised, which itself brings its own demands in terms of skill sets, renewable energy skills, planning, construction and the entire infrastructure agenda that the Government has set out. Everything from our metros, DART+, energy grids and housing supply that we want to radically ramp up is all dependent on a skilled workforce with the relevant training and skills available to build it all out. When we look at these four Ds together, they will result in considerable structural change across the economy. Each of these megatrends has the potential to impact on the key components of economic growth, such as productivity, labour and capital. Ireland has navigated periods of profound economic transition before. A century ago, the majority of our workforce was employed in agricultural and manual labour. By the 1960s, free secondary education had transformed opportunity for an entire generation. Today, we face another transition, one driven by technology, demographics and global competition, and once again education and skills policy will determine how successfully Ireland adapts. They are accelerating the pace at which skills requirements evolve and place unprecedented pressure on education and training systems to respond with speed, scale and precision. They are accelerating the demand for digital, green, healthcare, engineering and adaptive workforce skills. They are making lifelong learning, reskilling and flexible education systems even more critical to ensuring that we can keep pace with the changing and evolving demands of our workforce needs. It is, therefore, an opportune time to pause and reflect on the current state of play of our skills and innovation systems to determine both where we stand and where we must go next. My Department was established less than six years ago to ensure that Ireland's economy and society were enabled to adapt to the challenges and uncertainty we now face. I see our role in that way as responding to both the immediate needs of today but also looking ahead to anticipate future needs. My Department increasingly operates at the intersection of education policy and enterprise policy and in many respects it might be termed a ministry for the future, ensuring that our people, our research system and our skills base remain Ireland's greatest competitive advantage. As Minister, I am guided by four clear priorities. First, to foster research and innovation as an economic enabler. Second, to provide high quality, highly accessible tertiary education. Third, to expand and develop pathways to skills, reskilling and apprenticeships to match Ireland's evolving workforce and societal needs. Fourth, to promote curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge and education as a public good in its own right. I am expanding pathways to skills, reskilling and apprenticeship capacity through targeted investments across that sector. Our further and higher education system has expanded rapidly in recent years through this increased funding, with more course places, apprenticeships and alternative entry routes beyond the traditional CAO pathway being made available. Higher education enrolments reached nearly 279,000 students in 2025. This was a 5% increase on 2024, with CAO applications rising by more than 7% in 2025. To cope with this demand and to accommodate more students taking their choices, we expanded places in high-demand areas, with more than 300 additional healthcare training places added in 2025 alone, summing to 1,100 new places created across the healthcare and related therapy professions in recent years. The future will require higher levels of targeted upskilling. Microcredentials are firmly establishing Ireland as a European pioneer in accredited flexible learning. There are now over 600 short, enterprise-aligned courses available to allow professionals to upskill and reskill in high-demand fields. We have also been busy building out the tertiary degree programmes initiative where students begin in further education and training colleges and later progress into higher education institutions. I have now almost quadrupled the number of programmes from 19 in 2024, when it commenced, to 78 now in 2026, with programmes expanding into areas like occupational therapy, nursing, social care and the creative arts. I have just come from a graduation ceremony at Dunboyne College of Further Education, which now has a feeder school into Maynooth University school of nursing. Dunboyne College has many other occupations and qualifications on its list. It, along with many other FET colleges around the country, is now providing local and regional access to high standards of education, which can lead on to a tertiary degree or to further qualifications in universities elsewhere. We have also significantly expanded the apprenticeship system to address shortages in construction, engineering, ICT, healthcare and trades. There are now over 80 different programmes of apprentices and the total number of apprentices exceeded 31,000 at the end of 2025, which is an increase of almost 60% since 2020. Construction and construction-related apprentices accounted for almost 23,000 of these, up 57% from the same period. Our target is to increase annual apprenticeship registrations to 12,500 per annum by 2030. My officials are currently developing an action plan to achieve this target and it will be published by the end of the year. This additional apprenticeship capacity is funded through the National Training Fund, a cornerstone of our education skills framework which also supports a range of other skills programmes, including Springboard+ through our higher education institutions and the skills to advance scheme through our education and training boards. The common denominator is that the programmes are aimed at increasing the skills of our population, particularly in areas of key importance to our economy such as engineering, IT and construction. In 2025 I allocated €489 million to workforce training, which represented an 85% increase over 2020 expenditure. In January, I signed the commencement order for the National Training Fund (Amendment) Act 2025, which enables the drawdown of €1.5 billion from the National Training Fund surplus over the six years to 2030. This comprises €885 million in current funding and a €650 million capital uplift. This funding will deliver increased investment in further education apprenticeships, research support, modern infrastructure to deliver world-class skills, as well as expanded healthcare and veterinary training facilities. As a Government, we want to be sure that the National Training Fund continues to future-proof Ireland's workforce and ensure that it is equipped with the skills needed to thrive in an increasingly unpredictable global landscape. I am engaging with the Tánaiste in his role as Minister for Finance regarding the treatment of the National Training Fund within expenditure ceilings and working collaboratively across the board to ensure the National Training Fund can be deployed strategically, responsibly and at scale to meet Ireland's long-term skills and competitiveness needs. The National Training Fund also supports the work of Skillnet Ireland, the workforce development agency. Investment in the agency has grown substantially year on year. Since my Department was established in 2020, investment in Skillnet Ireland's core funding has grown significantly, rising by 43% from approximately €36 million to €51 million in 2025. Through 17 enterprise-led networks, Skillnet delivers training that is demand-driven and tailored specifically to the needs of industry. This partnership approach underpins our approach to skills development. All of these developments highlight the multiple pathways for people to begin their journey in the workforce and to expand their knowledge, skills and experience over time. Everyone needs to evolve their skills given the pace of change and my Department's work is critical in enabling this lifelong learning, agile response to skill sets and taking bite-sized chunks of an educational journey through things like microcredits and flexible credentials. We also know that success must be predicated on strong collaboration with industry and education, and my Department plays a key role in ensuring that key stakeholders are working together to keep pace with the demands of the modern world. It does this by bringing together further and higher education, enterprise and Government to ensure skills provision is aligned with the needs of the economy. We take a whole-of-government approach, working closely with key Departments to ensure alignment. Skills policy now cuts across every major national mission. Housing delivery depends on construction skills. Climate transition depends on engineering capability. Digital transformation depends on advanced technical talent. Meeting our disability and healthcare needs requires a team of healthcare professionals. All of these demand co-ordination across the Departments of housing, education, enterprise and, of course, infrastructure through the Department of public expenditure and infrastructure. Of course, we must also ensure our policies are grounded in reality and responsive to the shifts and the needs of business to meet the increasing challenges and unpredictability of the workplace today. I have convened a set of national skills round-table discussions to bring together leading employers, industry bodies, trade unions, education partners and others to identify skills gaps and ensure that training pipelines match real-world employment needs. Just this morning I jointly hosted an event with the Minister, Deputy James Browne, in UCD with the main construction players, as I just mentioned and the different agencies and representative associations. The event focused on construction skills and infrastructure needs, with over 50 delegates attending and participating in the task of shaping our skills landscape together in order that we can meet our national ambition in construction and infrastructure growth. This series marks the beginning of a national programme of structured, sectoral-focused, high-level engagements ensuring that Ireland has the right skills for a rapidly changing economy. The series will examine how AI, digital transformation, new technologies and evolving work practices are reshaping the skills required across every sector and identifying and taking actions now to future-proof our workforce. Through the series, round-table members participate in targeted, deep-dive sessions. Insights gathered will drive national skills policy, investment priorities and support long-term workforce planning. Another way we are preparing for the future is through the reformed National Skills Council. This was fundamentally reformed and re-launched last year to provide strategic foresight and bridge the gap between education, enterprise and Government to meet modern workforce demands. The restructuring, following a recommendation of the OECD, focuses on transforming the Irish skills ecosystem to prioritise the employer's voice in workforce development and address structural changes, such as the digital transformation and the transition to a net-zero economy. The council has published its inaugural strategic advice to Government, Skills Matter: Priorities to Shape Our Future Capabilities. Key recommendations of this advice include establishing a national skills observatory, effectively a database of real-time information on our skills needs, vacancies, gaps and the requirements of society and the economy to meet the ongoing needs through our skills and talent provision. It also proposed leveraging the National Training Fund more effectively so investments can be better aligned with the upskilling needs of enterprise and workers; and shifting the education and training system to support flexible, lifelong learning opportunities. The national skills observatory is currently in development, and this will transform our skills and intelligence landscape. It will help us to map out Ireland's future skills pipeline and provide the best education and training responses for identified needs with greater precision and foresight. It will strengthen our skills response, so that it is agile and able to pivot, enabling us to address emerging and pressing needs. I am looking forward to receiving the National Skills Council’s second set of advice which is anticipated next month. Ireland has strongly succeeded when we concentrated on excellence, in institutions like Tyndall, the original regional technical colleges now technological universities, and our apprenticeships. However, the existing system was built for a slower moving economy and perhaps a slower moving State. The economy now moves faster. I am resetting the systems we have in place to drive the development of skills, investing in programmes that ensure we have systems that are agile, responsive and closely aligned with industry needs. My Department is exploring the concept of national skills academies that will build on our tradition of excellence by creating recognised national centres with deep industry integration and strong regional impact. Put simply, these academies would be centres of excellence, focused high-quality hubs that bring together education providers and industry in key areas of strategic need. These centres can act as anchors within our skills system, driving innovation curricula, accelerating the adoption of new technologies and providing clear, high-quality pathways into critical occupations. Whether in areas such as digital technologies, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, construction, retrofitting, the green economy and much more, centres of excellence can help ensure that our training provision is not only keeping pace with change but actively shaping and leading it. They can concentrate and bring together expertise, support regional development, and act as beacons that attract both learners and investment. This would ensure alignment with jobs, working closely with employers in the design of training so people gain skills that lead to real opportunities. It would ensure that businesses, particularly SMEs, are supported to access the talent and training they need to grow, innovate and adopt new technologies. Just as importantly and critically, national skills academies are about people. They would open up flexible, accessible learning opportunities, supporting lifelong learning, helping people adapt in their careers and creating new pathways into employment for anyone who might have been left behind. They would help us to build a more inclusive labour market, where everyone has the opportunity to contribute and succeed, ensuring that we have the skills, talent and systems to shape change and to lead it. Investing in skills means investing in our people. When we invest in our people, we invest in Ireland’s future. On the innovation front, the programme for Government sets out an ambitious set of commitments for research. I am very much focused on research and innovation as an economic enabler and a creator of societal resilience. I have increased investment in research with over half of the €4.55 billion that I secured under the national development plan dedicated to this crucial economic tool. This includes €750 million of new money for a landmark INSPIRE research infrastructure programme, focusing on research equipment across the higher education sector; and in parallel an increased budget for Research Ireland to support the implementation of its inaugural five-year strategy, Curiosity, Capability and Competitiveness. The three pillars of the Research Ireland strategy of talent, economy and society speak to the same goals I set out earlier. We are also expanding our role in European and global research systems, for example, through membership of CERN which I did in my first 100 days serving in this role; signing the European Quantum Pact; and securing to date over €1 billion in Horizon Europe funding. While INSPIRE is funding research equipment, it is a strategic investment in Ireland’s talent and innovation ambitions. Research infrastructure is not a niche academic concern; it is national infrastructure and a public good in the same way that transport, energy and digital networks are national infrastructure. Strengthening Ireland's research workforce is a cornerstone of national research and innovation policy. I am progressing multiple routes to nurture our existing research community such as through a range of Research Ireland's programmes and attracting international research through the Global Talent Ireland initiative that I launched last summer along with a new and expanded scholarship programme, called Global Gaels. I am also very keen to strengthen the links between PhD provision and industry so that PhD graduates enter the labour market with the best possible, employer-ready skill set. In this regard, I am examining the industrial PhD model used in other countries and also looking at other ways we can align the needs of industry with our emerging research talent. I welcome the opportunity to reflect on these issues in today’s debate because the scale and speed of change we are now experiencing demand constant attention and resources. The reality is that there is no single, simple response to the challenges posed by the 4 Ds I set out at the start. We are dealing with overlapping pressures on our labour market, our public finances, our infrastructure and our capacity to deliver. It is clear that in the years ahead, we will face difficult choices about how we prioritise resources and where we focus our efforts. Investment in education, research and innovation is always money well spent. We are already seeing the fruits. We are already beginning to see the needs for these areas. Whether it is expanding our construction workforce to meet housing and climate targets or to grow our healthcare workforce in response to demographic change, the competition for talent and skills will only intensify. It is important that we try to meet these demands and try to scale up as rapidly and sustainably as possible. The return on skills investment and research investment is not immediate but it plants a seed which will flourish over time. The results will not come overnight but they will come tomorrow and in the generation to come. That creates a responsibility to act early, to stay the course, and to resist the temptation to be short term or reactive in our thinking. There is a great deal under way already and a lot more to come. When my grand aunt Alice was born a century ago, the newly released census captured a country still finding its feet economically, educationally and societally. The decisions taken by successive generations transformed Ireland in the course of her lifetime. The responsibility on our generation is no different: to ensure that the Ireland taking shape over the next century is equally prepared, equally ambitions and equally capable of adapting to the world ahead. I look forward to the rest of the debate and listening to the views of colleagues on this important discussion.