Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Yes, but I did not realise that until I was at the ASTI conference in 2011, where he was one of the speakers. He announced that he is Irish by choice, whereas most of the other people in the room were Irish by accident. I have got to know him reasonably well since then and he makes the point that Open University was an obsession of Harold Wilson's in the Labour Cabinets between 1964 and 1974, allowing for the Ted Heath interregnum. Wilson was a scholarship boy from a lower middle class or working class background, who went to grammar school, an example of that famous divide in the British educational system between secondary modern and grammar schools. He had a sense of the very bright cohort that came from grammar schools and for whom part of the social deal in England - and I am talking about England rather than Great Britain - was that if one was working class and qualified and went to college one detached oneself from one's roots. It was nearly an unwritten condition. People changed their accents and their cultural lives were quite different from those they had been born into. In some cases they left their entire family behind. I know a young woman who travelled a very similar route and has little or no connection with her family or its immediate circle, which I think is tragic. Open University was Wilson's attempt to address that and most of his contemporaries thought it was a nonsense, that it would not work and that there would be no demand for it. What we have discovered is that it is an extraordinary success. It is not part and parcel of our infrastructure. I know that many people in the Republic take its courses. We do not have immediate plans of which I am aware to make the relationship more formal, but it is open to pretty well anybody to take its courses.