Neil McDonnell

The fund was set up in 2000 with a progressively increasing levy on employers via employers PRSI.

And it's currently 1%.

And that's generating about 1.2 billion euros a year.

in money into the training fund, which is kept, it's separated from the national accounts and it's money that under the original legislation was meant to be spent on in-work or work-adjacent training or for people who wanted to enter the workforce.

Of course, it would be a benefit to employers and employees.

The difficulty is that the law was changed last year to extend the range of expenditures that could be applied to.

And the state can now take that money out of a fund which currently is in surplus to the tune of about 1.7 billion euro.

and spend it on the physical infrastructure of universities.

That's not what it was intended for.

And in the meantime, our skills education for our workers is static or falling.

And we're all seeing the output of it today.

Even you see it in the examiner today, industry telling Minister Lawless.

that we don't have the plumbers, the electricians, the carpenters to build out the housing that we so badly need.

That's what it was always intended to be spent on and that's where it should go.

It really won't.

And look, first of all, the money that is going to universities on training schemes is absolutely money well spent.

What we're saying is that spending that money on the fixed estate is not.

There is no point in Ireland turning out the brightest students in the world from schools and colleges, which, you know, the PISA scores and OECD say we do, and then letting them grow into the dumbest adults in the OECD.

And these are not ISME stats.

You know, the OECD is saying that