Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity. Simon Harris has a rare one. In the history of the state very few government departments have been created from scratch. Harris’ department is basically the department of skills and science, basically, but it has a far longer name. Formally Harris is Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. The role his department plays is potentially transformative, with a projected 320,000 or more jobs destroyed as a result of Covid-19, a further and higher education sector in need of reform and reimagining, low levels of life-long learning, and a problem with diversity. Harris speaks passionately about addressing all of these areas.

The scale of each problem is vast. Take lifelong learning. Ireland’s lifelong learning participation rate for 25 to 64-year olds is 6.7 per cent. The EU average is 10.7 per cent. Countries we want to emulate like Denmark (31.7 per cent), Sweden (28.9 per cent) and Finland (25.1 per cent) are far in advance of us.

Take funding the systems of further and higher education properly. The European Universities’ Association puts the Irish system as ‘at risk’ of further deterioration if hard decisions on funding aren’t made. But funding doesn’t come without the promise of transformation, and universities have been slow off the mark in responding with coherent plans for that transformation. Luckily the can-kicking on funding will come to an end early next year with the publication of the European Commission’s funding report. The need for a proper strategy around literacy of all kinds is clear, as is the need to link the department to social protection in order to advance the retraining agenda.

In this discussion we cover the establishment of the department, ask what success looks like, how this new department differs from the Department of Health, what role his department can play in bringing the public into a national conversation about research and innovation, the role of experts from all disciplines in helping government function, where new connections can be made North and South around infectious disease research, and more.

I’m struck by how Simon Harris appreciates the opportunity for change this new ministry gives him, and how mindful he is about the need to make the most of it for the country. I hope you enjoy the exchange.

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Stephen Kinsella (SK): Simon Harris, Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science.  That’s a big title.

Simon Harris (SH): It’s a catchy one, isn’t it?

SK: It’s catchy. If you had to invent a different title for it, what would the title of your department be?

SH: Let’s just see how good I am at catchy titles. Well, I think I am a Minister for Skills, really. I think I’m also the minister for in many ways your future, your ambition, your mission. I very much see the role and it’s very hard to get it into a catchy title, I very much see the role though as a department that does everything it can to help you the citizen get to wherever you wish to in life by whatever route you wish to take. 

And I think – and in fairness to the Taoiseach, this department was his brainchild and he had a very interesting perspective because he had been the Minister for Education and then he had been the Minister for Enterprise, so he had seen how bits of both of those departments interacted in what I’ve just said and his kind of view was that no longer should further and higher education be the poor relation hidden away in the Department of Education with very fine people working on the issues. 

But if you’re the Minister for Education you’ve so much to do in terms of pupil-teacher ratios and all those really important issues before you get anywhere near further or higher education, that it just wasn’t getting the political attention and I think as a result of that, our higher education system has kind of meandered on for the last number of years with some great success and some great institutions but without any real clear kind of policy direction. And I found a sector and I think a society kind of craving that. 

When I was appointed, for the first 24 hours, this was called the Department of Higher Education, Research and Science, I think, and we changed the name to put further and higher education in because again I thought that was a real missed opportunity if people thought this was just a department for the universities, because it’s not. This is the department for people of our country. There’ll be lots of different routes to get people to where they want to get to.

SK: I’m reflecting on your answer. It strikes me that you’ve a very rare opportunity. So, very few people get to set up a government department. Very few.  And you get to deliver on it as the first minister for this further, higher education, you know, we can call it 3rd level really and then innovation, science, skills. If you stay in post and the government runs its course, you’ll have been the minister for four or five years, so at the end of that five years, what does success look like for you?

SK: So, I think success looks like every child will sit down at 17 years of age with their mum or their dad and have a conversation about what they want to do after school, but that conversation is much broader, is much more inclusive and is much more diverse, that the mums and dads of Ireland don’t see success as necessarily their child going down a narrow route, but a much broader range of options.

It looks like settling the question in relation to how we properly fund higher education, a question that has been – let’s be honest – has been neglected. We’ve seen political cowardice around this issue across the board for a generation. I mean I often reflect on the mantra for the Oireachtas seems to be is there anything to be said for another report, but the good news is we’re almost out of reports because the final one is due back from the European Commission, the economic evaluation at the start of 2021. 

I’d hope to have made real progress and I feel so passionate about this – genuinely – on undergraduate education, third-level education as you rightly call it, whatever route you take, being seen as a natural continuation of your education in Ireland, so I think what people like Donogh O’Malley did is just transformational and he was told by everybody he couldn’t do it.  He was told by, from what I can see, every official he ever met told him he couldn’t do it, and he did it. And he was told it was unaffordable and it now actually turns out to be that’s such a stupid statement to make now with the benefit of all that we know about the importance of free second-level education. 

If we don’t do this and if we don’t get on top of this, we’re actually going to be in a tricky place

Simon Harris

We now have two years of pre-pre-school education in our country. We have a primary and secondary school system that are imperfect but working largely well and we now have a chance to prepare you when you leave our school system to have whatever career you want in Ireland. I think it’s going to also involve ending the – I’ve used the word ‘snobby attitude’ and I think it’s been misinterpreted a little bit – I mean a kind of cultural view of what success looks like in relation to third level, that basically is around going to university. 

If you go to other European countries, as I know you’ll be aware, the apprenticeship model is really well established and it works for business as well as people doing the apprenticeship because you get the educational learning piece along with the practical industry skills and I want the apprenticeship model in Ireland to be similar to ones I’ve seen in other places. When I was a junior minister I went to Germany and I met a chairman of a bank who had been the CEO of the bank and he’d come into the bank through the apprenticeship model. Now, could the CEO of an Irish bank get there through an apprenticeship? Not today. Is there any reason why they shouldn’t? Absolutely not. So, they’re some of the areas and finally on the research piece – because I think this is a really important piece – it’s a hackneyed phrase sometimes when people say once in a generation opportunity, but I genuinely believe that there’s a once in a generation opportunity to get people in Ireland excited about research and science.

Because we’re talking about it all the time because of Covid. So, we’re all talking about when will there be a vaccine, the efficacy of a face mask, different treatments. People like Luke O’Neill who have been doing brilliant work for years but we were buried away in their labs are now household names. People in Ireland are now seeing the benefit and I think we face huge societal challenges, be it climate change, digitalisation, public health, there is a real chance now for Ireland to lead the way. 

If we don’t do this and if we don’t get on top of this, we’re actually going to be in a tricky place because I think the battle for the future in terms of our international competitiveness isn’t going to be based around where does the big factory get located, it’s actually going to be based around people. Skills. Talent.  I just came off a call with IBEC.  You know, attracting people to Ireland to study and build their careers, we’re going to want the best and brightest to learn here and also to come here. 

So, breaking down our research siloes, setting up a new research infrastructure in Ireland, engaging more at an international European level on research. Settling the question around higher education funding, which has been ducked and dived for years, and broadening the conversation so that everybody has an opportunity to get to where they want.  Whether that means you want to go and study a PhD or whether you’re the child with Down Syndrome coming out of second level education today where the only conversation the State is having with you is what day care place would you like with the HSE, instead of saying well how do we help you continue to learn and survive.  So, three months in, they’re some of the issues.

Diversity, harassment and gender equality

SK: I have been very impressed at your very obvious and genuine commitment to diversity. So, one of the things that is just true, it’s not just construction that there is an issue – and we just need to improve diversity and establishing practices on monitoring diversity, particularly in HEIs but I think across the whole system.  How do you think about focusing on improving diversity and what kind of policy levers do you see being put in place to make those more of a reality, not just in the universities of course but across the system?

SH: So, there’s a couple of approaches. There’s the student issue in terms of diversity and the staff leadership issue, so on the leadership of staff issue, I think it’s I can see therefore I can be, I think is a very important policy lever and in fairness people who came before me like Mary Mitchell O’Connor started the ring-fenced specific female leadership post in senior positions in university. I want to continue that. I think it’s bizarre that in three or four hundred years up until the brilliant Kerstin May became the interim president of UL, your own institution.

SK: Indeed, the boss.

SH: I’d forgotten that. We hadn’t had a female president and often when I meet very senior people in academia they say, ‘Oh, but Minister, we’ve very many good female vice-presidents.’ And I’m kind of like, ‘That’s kind of missing the point, lads.’ So, I do think we need to support female leadership in academia. I think the SALI System is one way of doing it. I think we need to do, and I don’t say this to talk down our institutions, I really don’t and in fact I think the ones that get this right and I think reputationally but we have to recognise the issues in relation to sexual harassment, violence and gender inequality on campus. It is a real issue. It’s not confined to universities and higher-level institutions but surely if any one place should lead, it should be our education system. 

I mean this sort of stuff grows very, you know, it’s the exact anathema of what an educational environment is meant to be about, so I’ve mandated all our institutions – the very first letter I wrote to university presidents wasn’t actually about some of the traditional issues that are often discussed, it was on the issue of requesting an action plan – institution specific – as to how they’re going to tackle these issues, to be published by February, to be overseen and monitored by the Higher Education Authority for funding bodies and the likes to be made aware of the issues in institutions, therefore using that as a lever as well. And then on the diversity from the student side, I mean one of the very first meetings I had was with Pavee Point and I think they told me there were more Travellers in prison in Ireland than in university.

SK: Really?

SH: Yeah. Now I’d have to check that statistic but that’s what they told me. But the point they were making anyway was very real and I think the route of it goes way before the work in my department, so for example there’s a commitment to a national Traveller education plan and programme for government, and myself and Minister for Education, and I hope also the Minister for Children, need to lead on that because this starts at the very youngest age. We’re doing very well when it comes to equity of access in terms of improvements on a number of metrics, but the two we’re not doing well on are mature learners and Traveller and Roma. We’re below target on both of them. So, I think we’ve to look at that. 

The universities – and again I don’t say this in a critical way – they need to move with the times as well. 

Simon Harris

And I also think again speaking broader than higher education, there’s a story being lost in Ireland and maybe it’s being lost because perhaps it’s not something we’re proud of, but we’re leaving people behind when it’s coming to adult literacy and numeracy and digital skills. And again, Covid didn’t cause these issues but it does shine a spotlight on them. So, we have 16 per cent of adults in Ireland between the ages of 16 and 65 who lack basic reading skills.  What does that mean? They can’t read the side of their children’s medicine bottle. We have 25 per cent of adults who lack basic numeracy skills, can’t read the electricity bill. We have – or certainly read and grapple the electricity bill.  And we have 65 per cent of us who lack basic digital skills. I’ve seen different stats. 55 is one I saw, 48 was the other, but in and around half of us.

SK: Not great anyway.

SH: Yeah, not great. And we talk a lot about our knowledge-based economy and come and invest in Ireland and I’m very proud of that, but if we’re serious about kind of an inclusive social and economic recovery, if we don’t get on top of this, there will be people locked out of society and there will be people locked out of the labour market and the trajectory particularly in relation to digital is only going in one direction. 

I chaired by first meeting of a new group I’ve set up, an interdepartmental group, also with outside influences on it to develop our first ever integrated adult literacy, numeracy and digital skills strategy. And we’re going to measure what success looks like here as well but so in terms of diversity as well. I want somebody to be able to go to further education, I need to give them the levers and the tools to get there, and I think adult literacy is a good starting point there. So, it is about lifelong learning.  hen I was out in An Cosán meeting a woman in her 60s who came back through community education and did her degree. This is brilliant. So, I think sometimes people think I’m the minister for 18 and 19-year-old students and I hold a great grá for them and I think they’ve had a really tough year and I want to support them and work with them but I hope all the questions I get from people in general aren’t just about kind of what are you doing about university in terms of a very narrow discussion, because actually potentially this department is much broader.

Promoting lifelong learning. Breaking the rigidity of the university system

SK: So, it’s interesting because my next question is that Ireland’s lifelong statistics are quite poor by OECD standards. You don’t have a learning society if you stop learning at 25 or 26, right? So, what and how can the department support the development of new initiatives to encourage more lifelong learning? 

The universities in particular are highly specialised at an 18 to 24-year-old cohort with a research component for a much smaller cohort. And looking at the system level, it strikes me that there are potentially very strong connections that can be made between higher and further education. But also up and down the system so you could do a level eight and then do a level five later on and that kind of stuff.  I have always been struck by the fact that true learning and I’ve been a professor for 15 years, true learning is totally non-linear and yet our levels of learning are completely linear. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So, all of which is a long-winded way of saying how do we make it much more appealing for people to really get into lifelong learning and how do the institutions support it?

SH: So, a couple of ways.  I think we need business onboard for this, so if I go into the workplace and get my job, whatever my chosen career might be, I need to be in a workplace where ongoing learning is a core component of that. So, we have an agency called Skillnet, an employer-led organisation, we fund it, we increased the funding in the budget and they’re doing a really good job of making sure that you don’t necessarily have to take time out of work to continue lifelong learning, so it’s actually a part of your work, so I the employer see benefit in my employees being upskilled.

If we’re serious about lifelong learning, there’s not a huge number of people who can manage or afford to take a significant chunk of time out of the labour force, paying mortgages and raising kids and all of that.  So, we need to facilitate it. It is earn and learn, right, I think is the phrase. So, just using that as an example but the apprenticeship incentivisation scheme is an example of that so I’ve been working away in my business, I’m a good employee, now all of a sudden my employer can get a financial incentive to actually allow me upskill through the apprenticeship model, continue to work with him or her but actually take my skillset up a level. So, I think that’s one way we need to do it by partnering with business, industry, providing them with the financial supports to facilitate learning on the job quite frankly. I think that becomes easier with technology. So, it becomes easier for people to be able to learn remotely, not have to travel to the institute and I think we’re moving beyond universities being defined by walls in a very real way and again the pandemic has exacerbated that but that’s happening. 

The universities – and again I don’t say this in a critical way – they need to move with the times as well.  What they do they do very well but it’s far too rigid. When I became minister, within weeks we had to put in place the July stimulus and it was a great opportunity for every department to say well what can I do to help stimulate the economy and help people maintain employment or get back into employment. And I did find again great leadership in the IUA and Universities, it’s not a criticism but I did find the further education sector was more agile in this regard, so they were able to say well Minister, if you give us X-amount we can trade Y-amount. It was a real challenge from the university sector, maybe one we hadn’t discussed before where they were saying what exactly can I do short of somebody signing up for a year, two years, four years of programmes. So, it’s my long-winded way of saying I think modular learning and microcredentials where universities run much more short-term courses, microcredentials, where I get to dip in and out of learning, is a challenge we’re setting them.

Now we’ve some good news on that coming down the tracks and we’ve an openness from some of the universities to do that, but I think of our universities, they need to change or they’ll get left behind. They know that too and they would rightly say to me well you need to support us to change and fund us to change. And that’s a fair comment too.  So, it’s not an argumentative point.  We need to get into microcredentials and modular learning and now that we have the QQI framework there’s no reason not to do that.

SK: I agree 100%.  The universities are a thousand-year-old technology.  Right?

SH: Yeah.

SK: Zoom is not. 

SH: No.

SK: There are aspects of my day that are entirely transformative but I think a hybrid model is probably the way forward. But it does very often feel, just as just somebody who’s just doing this on a daily basis, it very often feels like I’m in the decaffeinated coffee production business, you know, it takes a lot more effort, it’s not really as good, you know. But then again, I’m also struck by the fact that lots more people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get to campus can take the courses.  So, there’s something about that balance and maybe technology stepping up to that.

SH: That’s it, and just to say just to be really clear because I wouldn’t like anyone to think I subscribe to the idea that we should be moving to an entirely online basis. I think education is not a transactional business and learning and coming together and brainstorming and even socialising, this is all part of development, it’s all part of true education, so I very much see that but I think – and I suppose the learner I’m thinking about for the purpose of the conversation we’ve just had maybe is a man or woman in their 40s or 50s who’s gone to college or never gone to college but is not at a point in their life where they can opt out of the workforce for a significant period of time, they shouldn’t be locked out of third-level education just because they can’t opt out of the workforce and we have to try and find that way of facilitating the learning while keeping them in the workforce. 

That will require some government intervention, so Skillnet’s an example, financial incentive for the apprenticeship is an example.  Also, the requirement of a cultural change in terms of the mindset of business and actually the mindset of all of us as citizens, as people. 

Trumpism, expert advice, and participatory democracy

SK: The crisis has really thrown up a very interesting collision – not collision, but maybe conversation between advice and decisions.  I think one of the institutional gaps that the crisis has thrown up is that we don’t really have a fully independent science advice mechanism.  And I don’t just mean public health people here. I mean experts from the arts, humanities, social, natural sciences. Saying to government here’s an objective analysis of the scientific issue, you know, these are the policy challenges, these are the possible policy channels. That idea about here’s some blue-sky research over here. We could actually translate it into implementable action there and thus demonstrate the value of it. It strikes me that in the same way that the Irish Government Economic Evaluation Service, the gap was obvious after the crisis of 2008, it was just an obvious gap for policy analysis.  It strikes me that there’s a really obvious gap for this kind of more holistic scientific advice-giving mechanism. I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this. Obviously, you know, your current role but your former role, you’re dealing with experts in a particular way and again there’s no need to comment on NPHET et cetera, it’s much more of a much more general question, really.

SH: I think it’s a brilliant question. Just even broaden it slightly more firstly. I think we now live in an environment, I think I operate in an environment as a public representative, as a politician where my constituents and more broadly the people of Ireland, don’t just want to elect me every five years or not elect me every five years. And that be the extent of their involvement. There is a yearning for people to be more participatory and I want to see Ireland be a participative democracy. And participation not just meaning voting. And sorry, without getting too high-falooting and going off on kind of one on this, but I feel very strongly about this.  I feel we made some of our best decisions as a country on big issues when we broadened the conversation.

So, I actually think when you look at things like controversial issues and social change that I was involved in in relation to the 8th Amendment, I don’t think the political system on its own could have ever gotten to that point.  The work that went in in advance of that was huge. Climate action being another example. The Citizens Assembly on gender now, so I want to get to the specific issue about expert, but I think actually tapping into advices, opinions, debates, facilitating them and providing a safe space outside of the Punch and Judy of the Dáil is important. I hear people kind of say we have a Citizens Assembly, it’s the Dáil. Yeah, but that’s really dismissive to every other citizen in the country. We’re legislators in the Dáil and we have to legislate and we have it adjudicate if you like on the different policy options.

But asking our citizens to give us their best thinking, blue-sky thinking then see through the blue sky and try and work it out, I think there’s benefit. On the expert piece, whether we look to the left of us or to the right of us, we are surrounded by other countries where people mock expert advice quite frankly. So, Britain during Brexit – we’ve heard enough of the experts – we don’t even need to waste time talking about Trump and Trumpism. But the devaluing of expert advice is something that worries me the world over. I’m really proud though in this country that that doesn’t seem to be, thank God, where our people are at. And actually throughout this pandemic, again without getting into NPHET and all of that, throughout this pandemic people have actually yearned to hear from experts.  And I saw this when I was in the Department of Health with the various research that we used to do and anything that was published showing how people trust various figures in government that was encouraging, but actually they wanted to hear from doctors or scientists or researchers or Luke O’Neill … they want to hear from those experts.  That’s good.

I think with the benefit of hindsight in the new role that I now have we have a very good chief scientific advisor in Mark Ferguson, an excellent man, very passionate, very proficient. I do look at other jurisdictions, though, and how that role was more embedded actually in some of the discussions around Covid that didn’t really happen here. So, Science Foundation Ireland and Professor Ferguson have done heroic work, great work, but it has actually been at a bit of an arms’ length to some of the broader advice around Covid. I think that’s something to reflect on. I also think our scientific and research community has been too disparate in terms of its structure. So, I think the Irish Research Council does brilliant work. Science Foundation Ireland, the stats show the transformation they’ve brought about and our higher education institutions do really good work. But if I as minister want scientific advice, who do I talk to, who do I ring?  I think we need to co-ordinate that so without getting ahead of myself, it will be of no news to any of those agencies that I want to look at how we break down the walls and the siloes and put in place a scientific and research structure in Ireland that can advise government and that can punch even more above its weight than individually they already do internationally.  So, that’s kind of where my head is at.

We’re going to try and brand ourselves on as world leaders

Simon Harris

SK: That’s fantastic.

SH: And could I just now on the North-South piece, because just in case it doesn’t arise, without getting into constitutional issues and green and orange and all of that, just on a purely practical level, the need for North-South co-operation on higher education and research is just no-brainer, an absolute no-brainer. I had an excellent meeting with the President of Queen’s who’s also the President of Universities Ireland which represents all the universities on the island of Ireland and I mean in the context of Brexit, where Northern Ireland won’t be in the European Union, we need to look at how we can collaborate and work North-South. 

One of the proposals I’m really excited about is the idea that we would have a research centre for infectious diseases operating on an all-island basis. That would obviously be a dividend coming out of Covid. So, I think that’s something we need to look at. We look at the map of Ireland again, forget politics and partition, just look at the map. The northwest of Ireland is a very obvious gap that we need to address. So, as we look at kind of infrastructure and collaboration and reform, the North-South piece I think is massively important.

SK: I think what is probably also true, North-South linkages are really important and actually SFI have been very strong in leading that connection through Professor Ferguson. But one of the other things that’s been really interesting, as a practising researcher if you like is seeing how the HRB and Science Foundation Ireland and the IRC have actually work… they’re using their sort of a threaded grant infrastructure so they are all … when you submit a grant, you submit it to all three of them at the same time, that kind of stuff. They have themselves been very active in breaking down these kind of barriers which is really excellent. And I was really pleased to see the North-South research linkage announced.  here is also the case of Scotland and Wales. So, there is, you know, they feel bereft, if you like, just as we know from colleagues at the Royal Irish Academy and although I’m not a member, but I’m just aware that that’s the case, you know, those kinds of linkages between research institutions are really strong because the questions are the same.

SH: Yeah, we live on a small island and we live beside another island that’s bigger but still not massive and I mean the challenges, the societal challenges that we’re facing are the same and are immense in scale.  I really think though, and I know I’ve been reading some of your articles and tweets and the likes of research for quite a period of time, I think if we want people to get serious about research, if we want politics to get serious about research, we have to get our people involved. I was looking at what they did in the Netherlands. I thought this was brilliant, it was Mark Ferguson who made me aware of this. In the Netherlands they actually went out to their people and said what do you want us to focus on?  What areas do you want your government to invest in work, because we can’t lead on everything, we can’t be good on everything, right, we can’t be the best in the world on everything, and I’d love to have and I’m talking to Science Foundation Ireland about how do you have this conversation with people about the relevance of research to their lives and how you can deploy that. 

So, I sit at Cabinet and we talk about climate action and we have a really ambitious Climate Action Bill coming down the tracks, obviously Eamon Ryan is leading the charge in that, and he’s so sincere in his commitment to it and our programme for government is, I think, objectively ambitious on climate. But I also sit there knowing that both from the skills part of my job, of we don’t put the skills in place, we can’t retrofit the houses, right, so who’s going to do them. So, that’s just the skills piece. But I also note from the research piece, we need to come up with solutions. We need to come up with ways of reducing plastic. We need to put the best brains that we have in our country to work and how we can live in a climate sustainable country, European Union, world, where we can play our part.  Leaders not laggards, all of this. And I think I’d love to have that conversation with the Irish people about what are the three or four areas we’re really going to concentrate on.  We’re going to partner on, we’re going to try and brand ourselves on as world leaders, we’re going to try to draw down European funds and the likes and be better at that than we have been in the past so we’ve made some progress.

So, because otherwise I think research and science is seen as kind of something over there. And if there’s a crisis we’ll come to it and we’ll ask it what we can do for it, but we need that infrastructure work and we need … and you know how politics works, we need it to be valued and appreciated by the public – and it is, by the way – but we need the public to be saying it to their politicians, so when we talk about climate, I never hear people talking about how we’re going to sort out the problems with climate through research and science, but that’s going to be a key way we’re going to do it. So, I think we need to have that conversation with people and I think the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, as soon as the Covid pandemic passes, I think there’ll be a window in which to have that conversation.  We shouldn’t miss it. I think it’s a once in a generation opportunity.

Retraining the Covid unemployed

SK: I completely agree with you and I’ve been banging the drum for a coherent research response for a long time.  I was really, really pleased to see that the need to have an integrated research response in the resilience and recovery plan, I thought that was just great to see. 

The figures from the budget that Minister Donohoe and Minister McGrath published show that there are very likely going to be a much larger group of people who are unemployed next year. Ireland has historically exported people whose labour supply was not equal to the labour demand in the economy. We’re not going to be able to do that next year. That creates a massive retraining problem. How do you think about doing that in the very near term?  You know, I’m aware that there are 50,000 places now as opposed to 40,000 places but that’s an extra 10,000 places which is brilliant, but we’re talking about 300,000 people potentially or more. So, how do you think about us meeting that retraining challenge in the context of a) a global pandemic and b) a sort of a need to produce a structural transformation in the Irish economy on climate, on research, on many other things as you’ve discussed?

SH: It’s something that is, as you can imagine, exercising me quite a lot. Not to be pedantic but just on the 50,000 places, I’d argue that it’s 50,000 additional people who’ll be trained in this academic year, if you like, so in July we announced 35,500 but the announcement in July as you know, the further education piece maybe doesn’t start until September or October but the point you make is still the same. I mean the scale of the challenge is immense. And I think being honest, I think the response that Ireland had to the last crash in terms of the infrastructure needs to ramp back up really quickly. 

I think – I was looking at from a remove then – but I think Ireland did a pretty good job of making sure that – I hate the word ‘activate’ – but that it spoke to people. You’ve lost your job through no fault of your own, how do we help you get back on track and we reformed our whole social welfare offices into Intreo offices and case workers and that worked really well. But we were then at full employment and therefore that scales down a bit. The infrastructure there, it needs to scale back up and it needs to scale back up yesterday. Now, there’s an appetite to do that and certainly a lot of my department’s energy is focused on engaging with social protection and then with us to see how we don’t just offer someone a social welfare payment but we actually have the conversation about what do you want to do next and match them to an appropriate skill and training place.  I think we need to ramp up the availability of places. But the availability of places in areas that are going to create employment. 

I don’t mean to be flippant when I say it’s not that hard to provide training places, it’s much more challenging but vital that we provide training places in areas where there’s employment. So, I keep using the example of retrofitting.  It’s a small example but it’s a really important one. You know, we talk about fuel poverty, we talk about skills.  We have a very ambitious programme to retrofit homes, we’ve a massive shortage of people who do it. There’s loads of potential employment in that area. So, this year we’ll open five centres of excellent across our ETB network for retrofitting training programmes. This year we’ve trained about 600 people in retrofitting, we’ll train 2,000 in 2021.  Small example but it’s matching people.  It’s not do a course for the sake of doing a course the government want you to.  And I heard a lot of that criticism from my own constituents in years gone by, you know, Simon, I’ll go to the training course because I’ve been asked to go to it.  But that’s not what I want to do, so it has to be person centred, it has to be, and there are job opportunities in the climate area.  But also in the construction areas, and some of the traditional skills, in digitalisation as well. 

This pandemic is going on longer than any of us imagined but I don’t want it to turn into a lost generation in our country. And the only way you avoid that is by not just putting out courses and places and glossy ads in newspapers, but it has to be learner-centred, it has to be what do you want to do.  And then the other thing that I think we also have to look at and I tried to do a little bit on this in the budget and I’d like to do much more, we … so I’m a student in college, I went in, did my Leaving Cert in the years that there was a Leaving Cert, did my Leaving Cert, got my place in college, I’ve completed my degree and now I’d usually be at a point where I’d be deciding do I enter the workforce or perhaps I decide after a difficult few years, I want to take a year off and do something – travel – do something that I may not be able to do later in life because of family commitments.  Neither of those options is as easy anymore.  There’s not as many jobs and we all know about travel.

For the first time in my time as a senior minister, you actually have the opportunity to come into work and to proactively plan an agenda

Simon Harris

SK: Sure.

SH: I want to make sure that those students who might have gone off in the past and come back and done a Masters, have the opportunity to consider doing that now. So, one of the reasons why I’ve changed the thresholds for postgraduate support from 31,000 to just over 54,000 and changed the grant from 2,000 to 3,500 which I’d like to go higher on that but it’s a start, is to try and remove the barrier to access that definitely exists at postgrad level.  There’s some barriers still, I accept, at undergrad level, but there’s a big barrier arriving from the last recession quite frankly that we need to now address. 

So, trying to provide people the opportunity to stay on at college and do the postgrad in an area you’re interested in and make it financially easier to do it, ramping back up the infrastructure and the interactions between social protection and my new department. Designing courses that actually matter, that people want to do. And I don’t think from my conversations with government colleagues, I don’t believe that finance will be the constraint on the numbers we provide. I believe ability to provide them to scale up and to target them is a more likely constraint that we have to overcome. So, I know – whether it’s the July stimulus, whether it’s Budget 2021, or not getting ahead of ourselves with the National Recovery Plan – I genuinely believe I’ll get massive support from colleagues to put in place as many places as we possibly can for training and skills.  The job might challenge my departments, my agency challenges are to make sure we can deliver them, scale them up and the enormity of that task is not lost.

SK: It is an enormous task, but it’s genuinely fascinating. I mean I’ve written several times that I think you have the most interesting and probably the most important department in the government. Ian Kehoe at the Currency sort of slags me a little bit and says you would say that. That’s fair. That’s a fair point. But I just think about it in terms of transformation.

SH: It’s weird for me, right. I’ve come from a Department of Health that I dearly loved serving in and I actually mean that. People look at me like I’ve ten heads, but I actually really loved being Minister for Health.  I just … I don’t know, I just met the most amazing people and for all the crises and all the mistakes that people will write I made and many of them valid criticisms, I just felt it was a really impactful place to be working with the most amazing people. 

And then you come out of that department where you’re in the level of intensity, I don’t think I can actually ever describe and it’s only when you leave do you really get a full understanding of what it’s like, and you come into a department where there isn’t 25 visible crises a day. There’s many, many issues and challenges and please don’t have people tell me there’s not or believe that I don’t believe that there is.  But it’s not the same level of public crises, what are you going to do, Minister, what are you going to do, Minister, what are you going to do, Minister?  Every day.

And that’s actually liberating in a way because for the first time in my time as a senior minister, you actually have the opportunity to come into work and to proactively plan an agenda that I will start and hopefully many others will deliver and build on, but that I do think if we can get this right, if we can get this right, we can make sure that we can say in all honesty you can be whatever you want to be in Ireland.  You can be whoever you want to be.  You can get to wherever you want to get to, and that might sound lofty and it is, I guess.  But it’s also doable.  And we’ve shown it as a country before.  We’ve already made huge progress.  You know?  So, we’re standing on a solid foundation built by many, many people across academia, industry and politics and officials for a generation.  But there is now, if we decide it’s a national priority and in fairness to the Taoiseach he has, but if we all decide it’s a national priority, if we’re all willing, all of us involved in the sector to change, to challenge each other, to be … to disagree without being disagreeable, to have the arguments that need to be had, to give the policy direction, I really think we can … it won’t be finished in my tenure but I really believe we can start something really exciting here that, when I look at my 18-month-old daughter, that you can actually be able to honestly say to her when she’s sitting down at 17 years of age, talking about what she wants to do next in life, that there will be a whole plethora of opportunities there that either aren’t there today or aren’t as clearly visible.

SK: That’s a brilliant place to leave it.  Simon Harris, thank you so much for your time.

SH: Thank you so much, Stephen, thank you.  I enjoyed it.