Many thanks Jordi, it’s a great pleasure to be here and to welcome you and your colleagues to Dublin.
William Butler Yeats said: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire". The trick for legislators, for teachers and for students is to find the spark that inflames the passion for knowledge.
The Erasmus Programme, I believe, has lit many fires over the last 25 years. It has immersed committed students in enthralling and gratifying social and academic situations. For many students the thrill of arriving in a new place, embarking face-first into an unfamiliar world, stokes a never-before realised sense of the possible.
Often when I travel I meet Irish students studying abroad. I am always struck by the way these young people are grabbing the opportunity with both hands and – frankly- I’m always a little jealous of the good time they’re having!
The Erasmus programme is an outstanding, tangible success. Since its inception it has enabled more than 2.2 million students and a quarter of a million university staff to study within Europe.
Each year over 180,000 students study and work abroad through Erasmus – hundreds of thousands enormous personal achievements leading to countless synergies of learning and shared experiences.
The personal skills acquired, the new friendships and tastes and the culture shocks are all as important as the academic benefits, contributing to a kind of mental mobility that demystifies difference and unlocks freedom and confidence.
Education is a key priority of this Government. We know our best asset is our people and we are determined to provide our citizens with the kind of skills and qualifications that will help the flourish as individuals while providing a highly skilled labour force for our companies and our society to develop and grow.
Our highly educated workforce is one of the main reasons why this country has become an investment hub and an open knowledge-based economy.
We have a very high take up of higher education among our young people, the highest in the EU and we are committed to reaching our target of 60% participation in higher education by 2020.
It is an ambitious goal but an imperative as we know that education is a vital investment for now and for the future.
Among the reasons I am supportive of the Commission’s work on Erasmus is because it fits in very well with a project which I have laid particular emphasis on since I became Minister for European Affairs. That is the EU Jobs initiative.
Ireland is extraordinarily well represented at the senior level of EU institutions, but there is a quite a shortage of a successor generation. I have been visiting Irish universities and colleges in order to make students aware of the opportunities which are there and to encourage them to think of working in an EU institution as a career choice. If a student has already had the benefit of an Erasmus programme, how much better qualified is she to move into the international world of the EU institutions.
A point about Erasmus which I found interesting is the response of Irish students. Irish participation in Erasmus is quite low, even though we have by far the most mobile student body. A major concern for students still seems to be about recognition of credits and whether a course of study is properly accredited and will be recognised in the student’s home country.
This underlines again the importance of the Bologna Process. We need a Single Market in education. The strength of the Single Market is that it allows for the widest possible choice of "product" but it allows transparency and access so that the "consumer" can be sure of exactly what they are getting.
I do not regard education as a commodity which can be bought and sold but I do believe that mobility and choice – without the imposition of uniformity – are really at the core of the Union and are something which we are actually obliged to offer the succeeding generation.
Another reason, I suspect, for the low Irish participation is the way we approach languages in this country. We have a huge amount of work to do to ensure that our young people have the language skills to compete and cooperate with their European colleagues. One aside – last week the German Chamber of Commerce told me that there are 72,000 unfilled vacancies for engineers alone in that country.
Ireland takes up the Presidency of the European Council in January 2013. One of the central themes of our presidency will be improving the European economy and, as a highly educated workforce is central to this, education will be a programme priority for us.
We will seek to finalise agreement on Erasmus for All. This will bring together all the current EU and international schemes for education, training, youth and sport, replacing seven existing programmes with one.
We are also looking forward to the Commission’s new strategy on internationalisation of higher education. Indeed it is the internationalisation of higher education that brings us here today.
Knowledge is the product of many minds working together. Ireland continues its tradition of being the land of scholars and we pride ourselves on being the nexus for the coming together of students from across Europe and the world. Our countries – our people as well as our economy – can only stand to benefit from an every increasing level of collaboration and research.
Education was never confined by national borders and it should no longer be confined by national restrictions. The generation leaving school today lives in a world completely internationalised by urbanisation and new media.
Europe is their homeland, in all its diversity and complexity. Erasmus allows many students, who would not otherwise have the opportunity, a chance to get to know and appreciate that diversity and make it their own.