Peter O'Dwyer

So it's good.

Yeah, I think like if you take the post-match in two parts, one on his current and one on his former job.

On the university side, there was two things that stood out to me.

One was the discussion about, which we have all the time, about our dependence on multinationals in the country.

And it's a topic that I'm kind of interested in, and I think we as a business post are interested in, how do we develop that indigenous enterprise sector in Ireland?

And it kind of struck me as I was listening that I often think of that through the prism of,

The political level, yes, but also then the state agencies of Enterprise Ireland and IDA and, you know, SkillsNet and these kind of guys.

They're the ones that should take the lead in terms of shaping the future economy.

But actually, as he was outlining that, you know, the research, and you think of Britain with its stellar universities, a lot of the great sectors that have come out of the British economy over the years have been born out of their world-leading education system.

And it kind of struck me that maybe we should be leaning on

That third level university sector more when we have those discussions of how to shape and grow a kind of indigenous business sector, because it's a conversation that seems to be had every couple of years.

And to my mind, doesn't really go anywhere.

So maybe taking a step back and bringing in the third level at a higher and more important level would be a little bit of a change as to how to go about it.

Maybe, but it was actually interesting, that part of the discussion, because on the one hand, you're absolutely right.

Humanities probably have taken a backseat already over the last maybe 10 or 15 years.

But I wonder, he touches upon it.

I wonder if we are at the cusp of that maybe changing again.

And he had a phrase about...

what people used to learn almost as byproducts of their core degree are now being intentionally taught and it's stuff around critical thinking people with degrees like philosophy that wouldn't have necessarily lent themselves to you know a direct route into employment before those sorts of skills have been able to think outside the box and problem solve I think are coming more and more into demand and

And it was interesting that he was setting the seven universities the task of how will you deal with in the long term, the kind of lifelong learning, the people who have to come back again to learn these skills.