TEACHING MATTERS:The Taoiseach recently suggested that the numbers unemployed in Ireland could reach 400,000 by the end of 2009. If this occurs, it will mean that the numbers on the live register will have risen by more than 220,000 from 179,600 in 2008 – an increase of 120 per cent in one year.

While the rapidity of this rise is unprecedented, we are still some way off the worst of the 1980s. The unemployment rate for 1986 reached 17 per cent and as recently as 1993 was at 15.5 per cent. Even the most pessimistic projections for the unemployment rate for 2009 fall some way short of these rates. Still, unemployment is now once again likely to emerge as the biggest single economic and social challenge facing Ireland in the coming years.

There are some important differences between the current crisis and that of the 1980s. Unemployed people today have far more marketable skills than before. Many are highly educated; they are globally oriented and mobile; they have valuable work experience; they have high levels of social and cultural capital. In summary, they were central to Ireland moving up the value chain in the 1990s. So, despite the shock of unemployment, and notwithstanding the global economic downturn, this cohort of newly unemployed may have more grounds for optimism than previous generations.

In a sense, then, the strategic challenge for Ireland is to link the capability and ambition of this talented resource to the goal of economic recovery. How should the education sector respond?

Firstly, it must be recognised that this task is multifaceted. It can be taken as a given that people concerned about paying their mortgage will find it difficult to think about upskilling or retraining. So any broadly based educational response can only be feasible in the context of a comprehensive national programme, where immediate concerns about personal and family financial security are addressed.

The education sector must mobilise our extensive higher education resources through the universities and Institutes of Technology around the issue of unemployment. These are regionally distributed and, in most cases, have a remit for the economic and social development of their respective hinterlands. They have a role to play in upskilling, re-skilling and the development of lateral skills towards enhancing the marketability of already highly qualified people.

In recent years higher education institutions have modularised and semesterised their programmes. They are now much better positioned to offer part-time, tailored subject and accreditation routes. This allows for a dynamic change in the content and structure of the curriculum as a means of responding to the requirement of emerging technologies and emerging global market conditions. They can do this while simultaneously building on the educational and work experience of the new unemployed.

During the Celtic Tiger many found it difficult to reconcile the pursuit of education with the pursuit of their careers. In the new economic circumstances, it is important that higher education institutions become all-embracing centres of lifelong learning. As such, they must look to the development of innovative partnerships and links with the workplace, so that the earning/learning divide can be addressed in new ways.

Ireland’s economic future is likely to rely more and more on a self-sustaining indigenous core of knowledge-based industries. While attracting multinationals into Ireland, we have been much less successful in growing our own such corporations.

• Tom Collins is head of education at NUI Maynooth