Last Thursday while speaking on this Bill I advised the Minister not to interfere with CERT but to retain them and to allow them carry on their good work in the hotel and catering industry. It is bad enough to hear that Bord Fáilte have closed down their offices in Manchester and in Birmingham, too, so far as I know. Those in the north of England who want to make arrangements to come on holidays to this country have to phone London.
I would impress upon the Minister that when we talk about CERT we are talking about a success story. They have proved their worth over a long number of years in their particular sphere. They have succeeded in placing the graduates they have trained. Their trainee chefs, barmen and so on are fairly sure of jobs. CERT are very much needed in the trade. I hope they will be allowed to carry on their good work and will not be turned into a dull inefficient nonentity. Fianna Fáil will be pressing that they be left alone. We do not want a dead CERT, we want them to be retained as a virile and active organisation who will be allowed to do their own thing.
I hope we would all work towards coordinating all the resources we have towards solving the big problem today in Ireland which I see and which the Minister sees is unemployment. I am disappointed that this Bill is entitled the National Employment and Training Authority Bill, that education has not received greater emphasis. To bring all sections with you, you must include education, training, at all levels as well as retraining, work experience and apprenticeships. We must also consider what we are training people for. Are we training them to emigrate or are there jobs at home for them? I can see some merit in a certain amount of emigration but 30,000 people a year are leaving this country. Many of these are in the United States illegally. A Bill before the United States Senate, if passed, will mean that everybody who has been in the United States illegally since 1982 will be sent home. Perhaps we should use our good influences with the United States to impress on them that if they want to be friends with Ireland they should give us, not so much aid for the Anglo-Irish Agreement, but visas which might be more helpful than dollars.
It appears that up to now education and labour have been divorced from each other. There has been a tug-of-war and an overlapping. Everyone has been doing his own thing and has been intent on perpetuating themselves. I mentioned that we allow more trainees to enrol in first year than we allow into second year because there are no spaces for them in second year. That is wrong. A conscious decision is made each year in most faculties that 50 per cent of those who have completed their first year studies will be failed because there are no places for them in second year. It is not because they have not reached a particular standard but because even in a vintage year they have not finished in the top half. As a result, they are to be turfed out. That is soul destroying and it is not just.
Where are the decisions made and where does the planning take place to provide the graduates we want? There are certain types of people we want in Ireland today. For instance, I am sick and tired of writing to the Eastern Health Board on behalf of people who are seeking orthodontic treatment. There are good dental hospitals in this country offering opportunities for training but when the training is completed, the new dentists go abroad. Not so long ago when there was pressure in the Dáil we had to bring stenographers with the required speeds from England. We have the capacity in this country to provide our own experts in every field. We should encourage people to opt for training in the spheres in which they are needed.
This day last week as I travelled back from Amsterdam following a Council of Europe meeting I sat beside a very nice young man. He was a Dutch expert in oil spillage at sea and in pollution. He was invited to this country to deal with the problem which is still with us down in Cork. He is the author of a book and he had his pocket computer with him. He knew all about the different types of iron ore, heavy metals and heavy oils and the likely troubles they would cause. He knew about our difficulties and about our rocky beaches compared with the sands around Amsterdam. If we had our eye to business we would have such an expert here at home. We have marine biologists on Sherkin Island who have been pioneers in monitoring red tide. They are internationally recognised to the extent that people come from New Zealand, Australia and the United States to their laboratories each year. We have never given them the support that was necessary. We should be in a position to qualify our own experts at home. There is no reason for us not setting our sights on greater horizons.
In my constituency I have seen great co-operation between the VEC, the adult education officers, AnCO, Manpower and all other agencies who are involved in a LINC programme. That is a specific programme geared to our area of Kildare and also to Laois. Regionalisation is the greatest hope we have of making a success of programmes and agencies such as these. I would like to see a tie in between social welfare and labour. When I was the Minister with responsibility for forestry I was conscious of the many people who were then unemployed, not as many as now but quite a considerable number. I felt that we should be able to initiate a pilot project. It struck me that in an area such as Mountrath which is surrounded by forests we could easily get people who are social welfare recipients and who have a knowledge of forestry work to opt for the forestry work which needed to be done such as pruning, thinning and the extraction of timber thinnings. This would have needed a certain amount of co-ordination between the Department of Social Welfare, the Department of Labour and the Department of Forestry but these people would have been paying their way. I must say that there was a great reluctance among those bodies to cut through the red tape and to co-operate with each other. I am confident that people in Ireland do prefer to work, if they get the opportunity, rather than draw the dole. This was an opportunity which was not availed of.
I must compliment the Government for introducing the social employment scheme. That is a good scheme but I saw a reluctance at Kildare County Council level to get involved in the scheme. A whole year went by before we got involved in the scheme, for what reason I am not sure. Other towns which are more tidy conscious than we are availed of this scheme. The trade unions were very anxious to see that their corner was not interfered with and that people would not be employed on work which could otherwise have been done by county council workers. That is a bad attitude to adopt. There is a great deal of work to be done around the country and not enough people to do it. In my county, general operatives are scarce but very highly qualified engineers are rather plentiful. There are a lot of chiefs and not enough Indians.
I should like to see a change of attitude among county councils and trade unions in that respect. Also, if we are going to employ people on social employment schemes, we must ask if that work is gainful, can those people taking part take pride in the work they are doing or do they consider it a dead end? School caretakers and others have been taken on and after a year have been let go because someone else would have to be taken on. There is no continuity. A lady who got a temporary job as secretary in a school with 400 pupils has been told that she will be let go in a short while. There is plenty of such work to be done in a school with 400 children. If a secretary were doing it, the teachers would be free to do the work for which they have been trained — to teach.
On regionalisation, it is vital that we take a decision that Dublin will not be allowed to run the whole show if this Bill comes into force and the training authority is set up. A Green Paper on Education emanated from Dublin which was to restructure the vocational education bodies. I believe that there was a national rejection of this idea. Kildare was to find itself in a region that included Kildare, Wicklow and Wexford. I do not know who thought up that Joseph's coat of many colours, but it would be hard to see a region stretching from the Lily Whites down to the Yellow Bellies, from Leixlip down to Carnsore, from Brittas Bay over to Bracknagh. It would be an unweildly, unmanageable entity and an unworkable coalition. It was doomed to failure from the start.
The local regions should be allowed to have a say and the counties are reasonably well established. Perhaps the reason for their establishment does not obtain today, but they have a separate entity. I am aware from my own experience with Kildare Vocational Education Committee that that is as good as one may get in Ireland. I should like to think that we could link all the education establishments together at all levels. I would welcome a great unity of purpose between places like the University in Maynooth, Carlow Regional College and all the schools, to see that those who graduate from such establishments will be given jobs at home.
We should ask if Carlow Regional College is too crowded and if it has more pupils than we intended when it began. If one is not in a position to improve the services there, why not provide another regional college for the south or west of Dublin between Carlow, Athlone and Dublin? Ideally, Kildare would be the place, where there is quite a large population. It is also vital that we provide in the area the education and training that fills the need of that particular area. Up to recently, one-third of all the cattle killed in Ireland were killed in Kildare. There was a plant at Leixlip, now sadly closed, but there are plants at Sallins, Kildare and Athy. In those meat factories, we have the nucleus of a meat industry, and education and training are needed in beef production, factory work, the meat trade, meat processing and marketing in all types of meat products.
I got a great kick some years ago when I attended the Green Week in Berlin, to see sausages on exhibition made in Hacketstown by Duffy's. These were supposed to be impregnated by Irish whiskey. When one can sell sausages to the Germans, one is on the way to success. I hope somebody at some stage, will realise that we need training in such matters, that the jobs are there locally and that the need should be filled.
In the midlands, there is the peat industry, and the post-peat industry is now being spoken of and the future use of cutaway bog, with the many facets and opportunities that that presents. We would need to be thinking in terms of a whole peat training and post-peat training programme. Many nurseries have grown up in that area; An Foras Talúntais have done very valuable work, as have Bord na Móna. We want to see continuity of employment when Bord na Móna have moved on. Some years ago, Bord na Móna put on a very successful film, the premiere of which we were invited to in a cinema in Dublin. The film was called "Inné agus Inniu". I should very much like to think that there will be an amárach as far as our bogs are concerned.
A special study could be done in our area on the equestrian science. It is the home of the racing and bloodstock industry and also the breeding industry. Research is going on there now which is comparable with any in the world. We have people involved in showjumping. I should like to make particular reference to an apprenticeship scheme which has been started there, called RACE. It deals with the training of racing apprentices and is based at the National Stud in Tully. Very good work is being done there. The VEC, the Department of Labour, the European Social Fund and AnCO are all involved and we also have many voluntary workers in the racing board, trainers and owners — very busy and very successful people who are prepared to give of their time and expertise.
