The junior Education Minister, Mr Willie O'Dea, will recommend that the Government set up a new education savings and loan fund to increase participation in adult education, which is currently low. He said the credit unions would be an appropriate agency to operate it.
Mr O'Dea was presenting a departmental committee's report on ways to finance adult and continuing education, which found that this sector was "seriously under-funded".
The committee recommended that the best option would be the establishment of an adult and continuing education savings fund, whose operation would be contracted out to an existing institution, such as An Post, the credit unions, or the commercial banks.
The fund would be based on personal contributions, supported by State and private-sector funding, with unemployed people required to contribute only a nominal amount.
Mr O'Dea said it would provide loans at favourable interest rates to people wanting to finance further education and training. He said the amount spent by Irish firms on retraining their workers was only half the OECD average. Because of new technology, it was vital to find mechanisms for retraining.
Mr O'Dea said he would move quickly on the committee's recommendation that a detailed feasibility study should be undertaken into an education savings and loan fund. This study will be carried out in consultation with An Post, the credit unions, and other financial institutions.
The committee's report said that raising Irish adult education participation rates to those of other European countries could not happen without considerable funding from the State, and it was highly unlikely that the private sector would be prepared to support such an initiative without State funding.
However, the Department of Finance's representative, Mr Joe Cullen, dissented from the majority view, pointing to the committee's restrictive terms of reference, which required it to come up with recommendations with "no - or minimised - effects on employment or Exchequer costs".
The report also stressed the need to make adult education more attractive to disadvantaged groups, such as women, the unemployed, and people trapped in low-paid jobs. Recent research has shown that most organised adult education in Ireland is "taken up by those who are already well educated". However, in a statement later Mr O'Dea agreed with IBEC that education and retraining must be aimed at employees as well as the unemployed.
"The employee in the dying industry will be on tomorrow's dole queue unless he is assisted to adapt to the demands of the job market," he said.
Mr O'Dea admitted that his original, more ambitious idea of a stand-alone "education bank" had run into difficulties.