Mr. Denis Cummins:

I thank everyone for their positive comments about our institutions, which is encouraging. I will deal with the questions raised by Deputy Fitzpatrick and Senator Brennan, and my colleagues will deal with the others.

The future strategy of DKIT is built around a collaboration and alliance with Dublin City University. We have mentioned the greatest challenge we face in recruiting students from Northern Ireland is the misplaced perception. The existence of an alliance with DCU will help to deal with that. The progression path that will be followed by other institutes of technology is towards technological universities. Mr. Hannigan will comment on that shortly in response to Senator D'Arcy's question about the early publication of the future strategy.

Deputy Fitzpatrick mentioned PayPal in Dundalk. We are working closely with the company to help recruit employees. Only yesterday we had a meeting involving our careers services, language department and work placement office. There is great potential both with PayPal and eBay.

Deputy Smith mentioned agriculture, and he will be aware of a successful collaboration between DKIT and Ballyhaise College in County Cavan, which we are keen to grow. There is huge demand for agriculture programmes and we are not able to meet the demand. One of the difficulties in our system is what while there areas in which we have spare capacity, there are other areas where we cannot cope with demand and it is not easy to move resources between departments. We provide an honours degree course in sustainable agriculture, which we run successfully with Ballyhaise College. We have an ambition to introduce an agrifood degree, and there is big demand in our region for that, but we are challenged in doing that because of staffing restrictions.

Senator Brennan asked whether we are happy with the number of students recruited from Northern Ireland. All three institutions would say we are not at all happy about that. My institute's new strategic plan sets targets to increase recruitment from Northern Ireland. We referred earlier to the problems and barriers, but it is up to us to break them down. Some are cultural and political and they are difficult, but others are related to simple logistics such as how students make applications and providing better information. We have made a proposal for a scholarship targeted at students from Northern Ireland specifically to come south. Our three institutions have a bigger interest.

I refer to Senator White's criticism of the Higher Education Authority. The authority looks at the overall system for the entire country. Our institutions, given their location, are particularly interested in Northern Ireland. I suspect this will not be an issue in Tralee or Cork but better mobility will be key to our future development.