Education and business have essential roles to play in providing opportunities for individuals to learn and gain new skills throughout their lives, the President, Mrs McAleese, told a major OECD meeting in Dublin yesterday.

Speaking at the colloquium on business-education partnerships in UCD, Mrs McAleese also said that investment in intellectual and ethical development formed the basic "building block" of the knowledge-based economy.

"Ireland is a particularly good example of a knowledge-based economy, for our greatest natural resource is our people, sometimes referred to as human capital, and in that we are rich," she said. "But even as we talk here, today's knowledge is rapidly approaching its sell-by date and if our human capital is to flourish it has to have an impatience with complacency and a thirst for what could be rather than what is.

"If skills and knowledge are to be the primary sustainable long-term resources available to our economies and societies in the years ahead, then we had better be doing what it takes to join up the dots between the spheres and sectors which are the primary stakeholders in education and training."

Meanwhile, 120 delegates from 20 countries are taking part in the meeting, which is being jointly organised by the OECD and the Department of Education and Science. It continues later today in the O'Reilly Hall in UCD and is being chaired by the Minister for Education and Science, Ms Hanafin.

In her opening statement to the meeting, Ms Hanafin said the link between education and the material and social well-being of society had never been stronger.

"For the business community, the key challenge is to resist the temptation to see education in purely economic terms," she said. "Of its nature, education policy has a long-term focus. This can lead to tensions with a shorter-term, results-oriented focus of business leaders."