REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF FASTRACK TO IT
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF FASTRACK TO IT, MANSION HOUSE, DUBLIN
Dia dhíbh a chairde. I am delighted to be here with you this morning at this conference to celebrate the tenth anniversary celebration of the Fastrack to IT initiative and to contribute to your discussions about how best to create an inclusive smart economy in Ireland. I am especially grateful to Fiona Mullan, Chair of FIT Ireland, and your CEO, Peter Davitt, for the invitation to address you today. I trust that you have had an interesting discussion thus far, and I wish to congratulate all of you here this morning who have contributed in so many different ways to the success of the FIT initiative over the past ten years. I would also particularly like to acknowledge all of the FIT graduates who are in attendance today. The stories of the FIT graduates over the past ten years are fascinating and inspiring, and today is a wonderful opportunity to see the advantages of focused, targeted, relevant and high-quality training programmes. There are over 8,000 FIT graduates so I will not have the opportunity to meet with all of them but I do want to congratulate each one of them and all those here today because the investment you made in yourselves through FIT is also an investment in our strength as a country. It is an investment that began with your individual decision to take the opportunity offered by FIT and continued with all the effort you put in to completion of the course.
The achievements of the trainees are testimony to the success of FIT over the last decade and highlight the significant impact that a collaborative approach between industry, government, educational providers and local development agencies can have on people’s lives. The combined contribution of the skills, resources and expertise of everybody involved – and I know the input of FAS and the VECs has been particularly important - has ensured that the FIT model has worked and that it has continued to change and evolve as the needs of society and of the economy have changed and evolved, some might even say revolved! Crucially, FIT is industry-led and so I thank the many senior executives from Ireland’s leading companies who have been involved in FIT as mentors and leaders over the years. The payoff for you is not directly personal but rather it is that Irish industry gets people with the right skills. That directly impacts on their employability and that is about as vital an issue as there is in today’s rather depressed job market where more candidates than ever are vying with each other for scarce jobs.
The personal stories of some of the graduates are inspiring, for FIT places its faith on people who are often left on the margins of the labour market – young early school-leavers, women seeking to return to employment, lone parents, people receiving disability allowance, and a host of other categories who for one reason or another might find the labour market hard to access. Yet each FIT graduate transcended their personal circumstances by dint of their own efforts, courage and ambition. They deserve our praise, respect and thanks for there is no doubt that each one of them puts it up to others who long for a change in their lives to do what they did and begin by changing themselves through acquiring new skills and the certificates to prove it.
The support from FIT goes beyond those certificates though for it supports your future career development and further education long after your training is over. That is why their model of training has made them acknowledged leaders in training and education innovation by the European Union.
FIT began in the boom years and now faces its toughest test in a much less buoyant economy. The misery today’s economic recession will not last forever though its precise end may still be hard to gauge accurately. We need to be ready for the renewed momentum which will come and our national aim to make Ireland a centre of high-tech jobs that cannot be outsourced to other markets, a smart economy relies on our workforce being just that, smart, educated, better than the rest, better than our competitors. A smart economy cannot afford to waste any talent that is why the inclusive culture of FIT is so important. But there is no instant or magic way to create an educated and highly qualified workforce - we have to do it one person at a time as you do in FIT. The individual is the basic building block of human society and if those individuals are strong, problems solvers, people of initiative and proven ability then that is the kind of society we will have. FIT and its graduates are a big sign of hope and they renew our faith in the future of Ireland, a future that will be crafted by the talent, skill and dedication of our people. I pay tribute to all of you here today who have made the initiative such a success. I wish you all the best with your discussions today, go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.