Results 861-880 of 1,081,623 for in 'Dáil debates' OR (speaker:Máiría Cahill OR speaker:Fiona O'Loughlin OR speaker:Roderic O'Gorman OR speaker:John Paul Phelan OR speaker:Réada Cronin OR speaker:Michael Healy-Rae OR speaker:Seán Haughey OR speaker:James Lawless OR speaker:Michael Moynihan OR speaker:Micheál Martin OR speaker:Brian Stanley OR speaker:Richard O'Donoghue OR speaker:Patrick O'Donovan OR speaker:Niall Collins OR speaker:Brendan Griffin OR speaker:Matt Shanahan OR speaker:Norma Foley OR speaker:Paul Murphy OR speaker:Christopher O'Sullivan OR speaker:Brendan Smith OR speaker:Willie O'Dea OR speaker:Joe O'Brien OR speaker:Michael Creed OR speaker:Marc Ó Cathasaigh OR speaker:Aindrias Moynihan) in 'Committee meetings'

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: I will have to revert to the Senator regarding the Confucius Institutes. He and I have constructively debated in the Seanad the importance of academic autonomy, which Senator Mullen will ask me about shortly, the autonomous nature of the higher education institutes and where the Government begins and ends where they are concerned. Recent weeks have raised interesting questions about where...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: Since 2023, my Department has been engaging with the research and innovation community on this matter. We promote the concepts of due diligence, proper risk management and ensuring that international co-operation is properly risk-checked but at the same time I would be loath to say - I know this is not what the Deputy is saying - that international co-operation is something that we should all...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: With regard to the budget, I thank Deputy O'Sullivan for acknowledging the positive in it. The budget for last year versus this year for apprenticeships has gone up by €10 million. Obviously, the backlog is a huge issue that we are concerned about but, as has been acknowledged by all parties, we have made a huge amount of progress on it. Eighty-seven instructors were recruited, with...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: There is only one, which is pipefitting, which is significantly longer than four years. That is only 1% of the apprenticeships. I am not in any way saying that is not something that we want to make progress on. On what the Deputy said about female participation, 8% of the total apprenticeship population at present are women. It is an improvement but it is not where we want to be. We,...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: I will. We can email it to the Deputy afterwards.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: The CAO is a great leveller in the sense that it is totally anonymous. It does not say that one went to Glanmire secondary school or that one went to a school in the South Mall or wherever. It is a great leveller. It is totally anonymous. It does what it says on the tin. It gives everybody, based on a unique identifier, an opportunity to go to university or to pursue a career for...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: I think Deputy O'Sullivan will appreciate that I would only be of a mind to go tinkering with something if somebody said there was a better system out there. I have not heard of a better system out there to ensure access to autonomous, independent higher education institutions through a system, which is not run by the Department or of the Department but is supported by it in the sense that...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: I am not of a mind to review it.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: No.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: I am not minded to conduct a review. One of things needed from this meeting is absolute confidence that the Department views the system as a system that works. It is the Ronseal system - it "does exactly what it says on the tin".

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: The Senator should withdraw that comment.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: In the first instance, we got a sum of money to activate the student accommodation system for 2025. This is in addition to the student accommodation allocation the former Minister, and now Taoiseach, got previously through the national development plan and the windfall. It is up to the universities to subscribe to and ascribe the thresholds in those instances. They will know what a 30%...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: As the Deputy will know as a constituency TD, the type of students we are targeting are those who will have come through the SUSI system, people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. They will obviously have met a set of criteria already to qualify for a grant. We have changed the thresholds this year to make sure we keep the people in it who are already in it and do not have people...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: Yes.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: To be fair to career guidance teachers, I think we are changing it. If anyone had the opportunity to attend the WorldSkills Ireland event held in the RDS recently, they will have seen that the place was chock-a-block with students from all over the country, led predominantly by their career guidance teachers. However, we still have a job of work to do. Recently I met a group of young...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: I agree with the Deputy. The people we are trying to convince do not watch Oireachtas TV. They are on TikTok and Instagram. Thankfully, we have good, young influencers, such as Building Heroes, who have a massive following on Instagram and are encouraging young women to go into apprenticeships and the crafts. We need more of that because not only are influencers telling people about the...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: Are we happy? Of course we are not happy when we see the deliberations in the Committee of Public Accounts with Accounting Officers - in this case presidents of universities - and the stuff we are all confronted with as Members of the Oireachtas. Ultimately, the Oireachtas votes the money to our Department and then our Department delegates it to the Higher Education Authority. It then...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: It concerns me because if there were a drop off in any philanthropic source, the spotlight will come back on our Department in the context of trying to fill the gap. That is not a space we want to be in. We want universities to have foundations and we also want them to be out beating the bushes internationally to get money to make sure that the next generation of young learners is properly...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: Some of the stuff has been more than disappointing; it has been outrageous. We cannot have that going on. We cannot have that going forward. There has been a culture change in the higher education institutions, which is welcomed by virtue of what we have seen in this room and others in this precinct. That is a good thing. It is good the institutions are held to account. However, I also...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills: Current and Future Plans for Further and Higher Education: Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (9 Oct 2024)

Patrick O'Donovan: As I said in reply to a previous contributor, it is a body of work that we are undertaking as a Department in conjunction with the Department of public expenditure and reform and other agencies, including Eurostat. It will have obvious implications. One of the most important things we will do in the short and medium term is to build capacity in our universities, especially our technological...