In the name of our committee and the Kosovan Parliament, I thank the joint committee for this meeting. We must translate because a number of my colleagues do not speak English. I am sure that the Irish Parliament has a busy schedule. We followed yesterday's budget debate. Our budget was debated two weeks ago.
The main purpose of our visit is to learn as much as possible from Ireland's experience in education. We are one of the smallest countries in the Balkans, with a population of approximately 2 million. I do not want to make political comments here, but the final status of Kosovo will be solved in coming months. Following that, it is important that we use education as a tool in terms of economic development.
We have learned that Ireland has been able to bring education and training into line in recent decades. In that sense, some of my colleagues attended a meeting in this building last year. We even have a so-called Dublin group composed of a parliamentary committee, the Ministry of Education and other Ministries. Its role is to develop a national qualification framework and a qualification Act.
The main purpose of our visit is to meet all of the bodies established by the Qualifications Act, to determine how the Act has been implemented and how the bodies work. What we heard and saw has inspired us to take Ireland's national qualification framework as a model for reforming the education and training system. After Kosovo's status is decided, it is crucial to have only one agenda on this issue of European integration. We are trying to learn from the Irish experience how to comprehend the law in the EU. I will conclude shortly because the idea of the meeting is to share opinions on different issues.
I wish to raise three matters for questions and comments. As a parliamentary committee on education, we are interested to learn from the experience of this committee, how it has worked with the Government and how it has held the Government accountable. As a post-communist society, we are taking the first steps in that direction.
The last two questions are more pragmatic in nature. We wish to have a stronger Irish presence in Kosovo. Ireland, together with the international community, helped us a lot to rebuild Kosovo from scratch. After Kosovo's status is resolved, it will be crucial to have political representations and institutions that will pursue the economic interests of Ireland.
During months of talks on Kosovo's status in Vienna, many countries were interested to see how the privatisation of public companies is going. I welcome a future possible interest in that direction from Ireland. Some 70% of our society is younger than me, at 36 years of age. Many of the them were born in the last phase of the ethnic conflict of Yugoslavian disintegration. They share a confident belief in a secure future. In the near future, we will be interested in co-operation at government level. In the past days of our visit, we raised the prospect of training programmes with universities and education institutes. Perhaps young Kosovans could get a scholarship to travel to Ireland for postgraduate or doctoral studies. At the same time, we could have support from Ireland to fight high unemployment in our society. This could be addressed at governmental level. I am aware of the job description of the committee although there may be some questions on this area. I am aware that the members belong to political parties, some of which are in Government and others in Opposition, and these may have a crucial role in the future to address this matter. I thank the committee for this meeting.
