Article in Irish Independent News by John Mulligan
A tour around the new AMTCE on the Xerox campus, is both breath-taking and insightful for those not at the core of manufacturing or education.
First off, AMTCE is the new Advanced Manufacturing Training Center of Excellence and it is packed with robotics, including Spot the Dog, cobotics, VR welding, multiple 3D printers of every variety and a classroom to train the cyber security specifically designed to protect manufacturing plants from system attacks.
Sine first leasing the building and equipping it with the lastest tech and machinery nearly €40million has been invested in the Centre, which will deliver over 180 courses to 3,000 trainees this year.
Discreetly tucked away behind the hedgerows which surround the Xerox site, the AMTCE is a quite revolution that will turbo-charge the manufacturing industry in the region and Ireland and help ensure the industry remains ahead of the bell-curve of constant technological change.
Leading the tour around the impressive suite of classrooms, labs and workshops is the Chief Executive of LMETB (Louth Meath Education Training Board) and founder of AMTCE Martin O’Brien.
“What we want to do is to lead industry rather than being reactive to industry. So that was part of the vision in setting this place up”, he outlined.
A former teacher in O Fiaich College and Principal in Bush Post Primary Scholl he continues, “When you’ve been around Dundalk since the 80s, and you look at where Dundalk is and have seen people in Louth, Meath, Cavan and Monaghan lose jobs in manufacturing, a lot of those losses were down to the fact that we probably didn’t modernise in time. We probably didn’t become as innovative as we could have been”.
“What this centre will do is it will help companies to be sustainable, to digitise, to be lean, to be more effective in the marketplace, and more competitive”.
“What we need to do, is we need to upskill locally and continue to trade globally. We have to move away and industry has to realise this, from high volume, low value products into high value, low volume”.
He explains how they looked at centres in the UK and the US and believes that the AMTCE is best in class, stating “We haven’t seen anything that will outperform it anywhere else”.
Pitching the vision and the securing the funding for the centre was a long battle, “I think we wrote about five versions of the same business case and when you have something new like this, everybody is saying to you what if it fails? What would plan B be? We did have a plan B but we were absolutely confident that it wouldn’t fail because we had skills audit with industry and industry know they have to become more lean”.
The challenge remains constant he adds, “just when you think you are lean, you discover you have to become more lean. And when you think you are sustainable you have to become more sustainable because the bar is raising all the time”.
Danger that economic corridor could become a tunnel if not properly addressed
Dundalk was a good fit for the AMTCE but not the only choice refelected Martin O’Brien this week.
“Looking at the Dublin Belfast economic corridor and how peopel perceive that, it could end up being a tunnel if things don’t happen in the corridor. When I say that I mean the whole business and the whole delvelopment piece.
“Dundalk is strategically well placed, between two principal airports, Dublin and Belfas. If you look at the port infrastructure that you have in Drogheda, good road infrastructure. If you look at the metrics around that, it’s predicted that the region will possess 20% of the population and produces 40% of the GDP. That’s the projections for this area.
“Then you look at the history along the border, of how the area has suffered from the fallout from the conflict in Northern Ireland, all of that, and what’s needed in Dundalk. And what’s needed in any town is a critical level of public services, and of educational aand third level buildings and facilities that allow the population to grow ant to achieve its potential. So they’re the main reasons we chose Dundalk.
“I do think Dundalk is the riht location for something like this because we have DkIT on our doorstep, we have a very enterprising population of people in the region who wants to develop, and industry is hungry for a facility like this.
“The location here will also be usefull on terms of the an all-Ireland economy and the potential to tap into grant aid that may become available in the future.
“Looking at this from the point of view of the hospitality sector in this region. We have 4,000 or 5,000 people coming to Dundalk, that might be a two day or three day or five day training course. Their employer is sending them here, a lot of them would need overnight accomidation. There will be bed nights in htels, B&Bs and Airbnb whatever it might be. So accomidation will be part of it. There’ll be the spin off the the loca economy and all of that. So I think it is really going to have a hugely positive effect on sort of business at other levels. They will produce a dividend to all the other businesses”.
The AMTCE: “really is putting Dundalk up in lights for all the right reasons.
“There were a couple of things we wanted to achieve when we set this place up. The first decision we made was the whatever we did in Dundalk, we would share with everybody north, south in the UK and the second thing was that for Ireland to be successful as an exporter on the global stage, we neede all of the people working together not just the people of Midlands o the 26 counties, but we needed everybody in the 32 counties to give us the critical mass and the where-with-all to actually affect change.
“The brilliant part of the ETB secto is you’ve got 16 ETB in Ireland covering 26 counties. There is great linkages between ETBs”.
He foresees Education Taining Boards (ETBs) eleswhere in the country establishing other Centres of Excellece similar to Louth’s, in other areas such as the motor industry, where significant training is required with the advancements in electrical car technology or the wider green engery sector or the aviation sector.
Vision of bringing all further education options onto campus
Over the course of the tour of the AMTCE it is clear that the Chief Executive of LMETB, Martin O’Brien is a man in a hurry, with a long list of future plans to further develop education in the region.
Amongst his longer term visions is to bring all adult education in Dundalk, Drogheda and Dunboyne in Meath into three individual sites.
“What I have noticed around the country is that anywhere you have has a dual provision, where you have this expectation where you can provide the needs of second level and further education students in the dame building, one or other tends to diminish.
“There’s a whole host of different reasons why that would happen. And I’d be very confident that if you had separated second level from further education that both would actually flourish.
“A decision was taken by government that there would be a new headquaters of LMETB in Drogheda and a site has been identified on the grounds of St Oliver’s College and to be fair to both counties, I think Drogheda is the right location because it’s very centrally located between Louth and Meath”.
“We have lovely plan drawn up that will accommodate us into the future. There is opportunity to expand that building if it needs to be expanded and we’re just waiting for approval now to move that to the next stage”.
He spoke about bringing all the services provided by LMETB in Drogheda, currently offered in DIFE and King Street, onto one site over a period of time, similar to what he envisages is already underway in Dunboynem adding that a longer term vision could see the further education O Fiaich College offer, the SOLAS training centre and the services in Chapel Street, join with the AMTCE, stressing “with a bit of luck in having the right building become available”.
“Like Dundalk, Drogheda will get its own for the further education college into the future and it doesn’t matter whether you look at Dunboyne, Drogheda or Dundalk as a FED College, the future is actually there. You’d have level one effectively to level seven Qualifications, so the first year or two of your degree will happen in those locations.
“In DIFE we have managed to link up with DCU and there’s 12 places ring-fenced for nursing studies students in Drogheda. So basically and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this, if you go into a further education college and you work hard, you do your work, you’re dilligent, you get the results. Now you’re going to college.
“So students are no longer depending on the CAO and the Leaving Cert, that’s a great thing”.
DIFE’s success in developing agreements with DCU has assisted LMETB progress, as DkIT works to establish Technological University status.
Meanwhile, the opening in 2023 of Ireland’s first Further Education and Training (FET) Electrical Apprenticeship Centre in Drogheda has been a major success.
LMETB is the first ETB to have established such a centre and the Drogheda College Donore FET campus is delivering training to over 300 electrical apprentices annually.
Parents like the ETB school model
“I think parents like the level of support their kids get”, offered Martin O’Brien, who is a former Bush Post Primary School Principal and was speaking of the second level schools unde the patronage of LMETB.
“The services we have in place, and it’s probably not a level playing pitch to be fair, because we have an HR department, so they employ all of the staff so the school principal doesn’t have to do that.
“We have a corporate services department who write up all of the policies and produce the templates, they work with the parents, the principal, the teachers, especially on policy space. We have an IT Department that look after the whole of communications, a Finance Department that look after creditors to make sure their bills are paid, a building section that looks after the buildings and repairs, so everything that the ETB brings to the table means that the stadd can now focus on teaching and learning.
“Our own principals won’t thank me for saying it, but they have it good, but they really do get well looked after from a support point of view”.
Indeed LMETB also offer their expertise to other local schools in the region. “I spent €60million last year improving our school, €60million. That doesn’t take into account the spending in primary schools and other secondary schools not under our patronage. We have nine school projects in hand where we are not patronages of the schools at all”.
With a long career behind him in education in many different aspects he points out, “Young people never cease to amaze. People talk negatively about young people but I couldn’t say I’ve had a bad experiance or negative experiance in that regard. If you just listen to them. Let them have their day the simply want to participate”.
The AMTCE center has been opened to transition uear students with great success, giving them sight of careers beyond going the more traditional route of a college education.
“One of the things we have done here is we’ve said, there’s no point in leaving it to industry to convice people why they should pursue a career in advanced manufacturing, there’s no point leaving it to the school principal, or the class teacher. We have opened the building to transition year students to come in, let them use the technologies, engage with cyber-security, engage with robotic welding, artificial intelligence, robotics, all of those things and when they go back to school they have a whole different perspecitve of the options that are open to them”.
3D printing houses a real innovation for future
“Some people might rightly ask the question, what will the Advanced Manufacturing Centre do for Dundalk”, mused Martin O’Brien as he outlines one of the most innovative developments sine the Centre’s inception.
To further the aims of the AMTCE in delivering high level advanced manufacturing training on an all-island nasisi he has signed Memorandums of Understanding with various partner organisations including the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre (AMIC) at Queen’s University Belfast; Southern Regional College, Newery; Catalyst Connection in Pittsburg; Irish Manufacturing Research (IMR); the AM group (a partnership between 3DGBIRE, Create Education Inspire 3D); the Portview Trade Centre in Belfast and the Engineering Technology Teachers Assoication (ETTA), the latter to have its first offical headquaters at the AMTCE.
LMETB is part of the Grange Close project, a pioneering housing development in Dundalk, a unique collaboration with Louth County Council, Harcourt Technologies and Roadstone, signalling the beginning of 3D Construction Printed (3DCP) social housing in Ireland, using 3DCP technology with the aim of providing a pathway towards an increased output of more sustainable, affordable, and efficient housing using Modern Methods of Construction (MMC).
“Because this centre is here Harcourt Technologies cam to meet em about 18 months ago. They said we have this business idea. We’re thinking of gettng into printing 3D houses, there’s going to be an issue on the training people for this. There’s probably going to be resistance from people who build houses a more tradtional way, so what do you think? I said we will co-operate fully, we will support you. We will provide you with whatever training you need”.
“So we went we bought a 3D concrete printer, so that we could train peopl. We then leased the premisis in Drogheda and we set our printer up there and we started to train people”.
“We then printed 3D houses in Drogheda. They were checked out by Louth County Council, Roadstone came on board and carried out all the research on what the aggregate should look like”.
Louth County Council CEO, Joan Martin then came on board and she decided she was going to use the technology to build three house in Grange Close in Dundalk.
“The printer takes a day to set up and it’ll print the house over about ten days”.
“With scale and certainty there will be a cost saving, but I’ve no doubt that as we speak there is a better and more effiient company printer, but the training part will be the same training.
“I look at it as a disruptive technology, the 3D printed house is going to be more sustainable, it uses less concrete in the construction of the house. The carbon footprint is going to be about 50% less, as what we’ve been told is they’ll operate off approximatly the smae carbon footprint as wooden timber frame house, which is quite unbelievable”.
“Again, look there’s various of testing to be done and proof of concept but right now it looks as if it’s going to overtake some of the modern methods of construction”.
The creation of the 3D Construction Printed training course, is part of the philsophy in recognising the changes required in the workforce and changing demands of current and future generations in the workforce.
“It’s about coming up with alternative that the new generation of people are happy to do”, explained Marin, “because the day has gone wher you can make somebody do something”.
“People say that if young people can’t do it off an iPhone, iPad or laptopm they are not interested. Say for example, welding, people perceive that as dirty work, not as well paid, with risks attached, all negatives attached to it that people do not want to do it, so you train them differently. If you train them, using virtual reality welding, they know the dangers without any of the side effects in the health and saftey enviroment and that’s conducive to their thinking”.
Blackrock/Haggardstown needs its own secondary and primary school to cater for population
“I still think Dundalk needs another second level school” explained LMETB’s Martin O’Brien when speaking this week during a tour of the AMTCE in the Xerox Technology Park.
“If you are look at the development in housing in Haggardstown/Blackrock and all of that, the area absolutely needs another secondary and probably another primary school.
“You will notice this from the local elections and indeed we’ll probably see it in the next General Election.
“Middle Ireland is changing. People have differnet expectiations, different needs, that require a different type of service and I think, we have the be ready for that and try to accommodate that”.
Link to the article in the Irish Independent Louth Meath’s new Centre of Excellence is best in class for manufacturing | Irish Independent