Huge swathes of the Irish workforce have been left behind in the rush to embrace the so-called smart economy, a seminar on adult literacy and education heard today.
The director of the National Adult Literacy Agency (Nala) Inez Bailey said the Government's focus on creating a high-end technology-driven economy had left thousands of low-skilled workers with little or no prospects of employment.
Ms Bailey was addressing a policy seminar in Dublin's Royal Irish Academy hosted by Nala to coincide with national adult literacy week.
She said 50 per cent of under 25s with low-level qualifications were now unemployed, largely as a result of downturns in the construction and retail sectors.
"However, the kinds of jobs we're creating and sustaining in Ireland are all high-skilled."
Similarly, she said adults with basic literacy or numeracy problems were three times more likely to be unemployed in Ireland than in other industrialised countries.
“The problem is we’re losing a lot of employment that is low-skilled and manual whereas other countries have had a greater length of time to evolve out of manufacturing and low-base activities that we haven’t had,”she said.
The Government needed to be broaden its focus to encompass the retraining and upskilling of workers who had been displaced from these sectors, she said.
The latest available figures, albeit dating back to 1997, suggest that as much as 25 per cent of Irish adults have some form of difficulty in basic literacy or numeracy.
The Central Statistics Office is currently conducting a major survey of adult skills in conjunction with the OECD in an attempt to get an up-to-date profile of problem in Ireland.
However, the results of the survey will not be available until October 2013.
Also addressing the seminar was Minister of State for Training and Skills Ciaran Cannon, who insisted adult literacy and numeracy was now a priority for new Government.
"The downturn in our economy has seen the emphasis placed on literacy skills shifting on what is traditionally concerned with personal and social benefits to the learner towards upskilling as a strategic policy in overcoming the challenges of unemployment and of raising skill levels within our workforce," he said.
However, Social Justice Ireland director Fr Seán Healy claimed the Government's aim to reduce the number of adults with literacy difficulties from 25 per cent to between 10-15 per cent by 2016 was "unambitious" as it still left more than 300,000 people of a labour force age with substandard skills.
Fr Healy said the aim, which he acknowledged had been inherited from the previous administration, suggested a complete lack of interest in addressing the problem.
