It is really important to have a debate on the issue of AI and the impact it is going to have on society, training and education but we have not really had one in this country for a long time. We are at the edge of a significant economic transformation in Ireland. We are probably one of the most exposed countries in the whole of the European Union in terms of the AI revolution. It is not something that will happen in the distant future; it is happening at the moment. It is already leading to unemployment in this country. Incredibly, 20,000 jobs have been lost in the IT sector in just the first three months of this year. That is an incredible figure. It is hidden by the fact that we have good job figures in general, but there is an underlying fault line which is starting to create major difficulties. I shudder for any parent who is sending a child into university at the moment and has to try to select the right jobs and the right courses for their children, given the fact that AI is coming after some of the most well-paid jobs in the country. Many of the jobs and the further education courses that were highly sought-after by children and parents are now the types of jobs that are going to be swallowed up by AI. I have listened to other TDs talk about this. There has not been an equivalent to the revolution we are seeing at the moment. The Industrial Revolution is probably going to be the closest equivalent to it. AI is equivalent to nuclear power in relation to its impact on society. It can, like nuclear power, be a force for good but it can also be a force for great harm. I do not think the attitude of the Government, which says, "Ah sure it will be fine; there will be bumps along the way but we will get over it and in the end we will all work out a little bit better," is the right attitude to it. It is going to have a severe effect on the economy. It is going to affect top-paying jobs the most. According to the ESRI, 7% of all jobs in this State, in the short to medium term, are in danger as a result of AI and its development. The closest thing I can think of in recent times, in terms of jobs being lost in this revolution, is potentially the bank crash. US tech companies are investing heavily in AI. They are slashing jobs in staggering numbers. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000. Block estimated 4,000 jobs, or 40% of its workforce, were gone. Oracle laid off thousands of jobs. Pinterest has laid off 14% of its workers in recent times. Google is saying that AI accounts for 51% of all code that has been written in that organisation in the last while. Block's head of engineering said 90% of the company's code submissions were authored partially or fully by AI in the last while. All of these areas are in big trouble. There are a number of things falling out of this as well. Staff are being forced to use tools that are designed to replace their jobs. On that key element of human oversight of decisions that are being made by AI, staff whistleblowers are indicating that this is not happening in many situations. Many of the entry-level roles for finance or law graduates are being replaced with AI at the moment. Like nuclear power, we really need to regulate AI in an international fashion. No individual company, or even a bloc such as the European Union, can regulate it by itself. As countries such as China and the US are going to look to further gain competitive advantages in terms of AI over the next while, there needs to be an international agreement on how we deal with AI and its development in future. That is the first issue. The other issue relates to training and education. There are 7,000 Irish nurses registered in Australia at the moment. We are educating Irish nurses to go abroad to work. That is bonkers. Spending significant sums of money to educate medical experts and healthcare workers to work in another jurisdiction is one of the stupidest things a State can do. An individual business would be out of its mind to do that, yet that is what we are doing at the moment. In 2023, the majority of doctors who graduated left the country. Right now, 51% of all students in medical schools in this State are from outside the EU. The medical schools are dependent on money to function. They are not getting enough from the State. They get far more from students from outside the EU because those students have to pay tens of thousands of euro for their degree. Therefore, currently the majority of medical students in Irish universities are from outside the EU. These individuals will naturally want to go home and work in their home countries. Again, our infrastructure is being used to educate staff for other locations. As a result, the majority of staff we are putting into our hospitals are themselves from other countries such as India, Sudan and elsewhere. It is not like people are not getting sick in these other countries. They are. This idea that states are educating people for other states and then filling their hospitals with graduates from other countries needs to be looked at. The idea that the Government is presiding over medical schools where the majority of students are from outside the European Union is wrong. I have raised this for the past few years and nothing has happened on it at all. I agree with Deputy Fionntán Ó Súilleabháin that there is currently a massive gap in the whole trades area in Irish society. It is one of the significant gaps that exists in the construction industry. The Government has indicated that there are quite a few large infrastructural projects coming down the line. We are hopeful of a Navan to Dublin rail line, etc., being built in the next number of years. We do not currently have the workers to fill those gaps. Right now, any domestic person looking for a plumber or an electrician is having great difficulties. The project to get solar panels onto our roofs is being slowed down by difficulties in getting electricians. There is a massive pool of Irish people working abroad who were working in the State in these trades. Aontú has a policy called "Operation Shamrock", the objective of which is to provide funding for these individuals to come home, to provide funding for them to work for four years in the sectors we need them to work in and to provide accommodation quickly so they have somewhere to live. The Government was able to provide accommodation quickly for IPAS and should be able to do the same to get workers back from the likes of Australia and Canada to work in this country in the trades where they are badly needed. As a country, we are at a precipice of enormous, radical change, change that most of us cannot imagine or plan for. There is very little effort by the Government to seek international regulation to control that change in a manner that does not disrupt people's lives. It will disrupt people's lives and reduce significantly many people's incomes, which will have knock-on effects on mortgages and people's ability to raise their families. That controlled transition is not happening, which will create great difficulties for the training and education sector.

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