Professor Mary Gallagher:

If any politician looking to sponsor one thing that would definitely make a difference, and it is not in higher education but would feed into higher education of the future, it is to help me to get a project going that would give all children in all primary schools at almost no cost - probably a couple of thousand euro - access to at least one non-alphabetical language, such as Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese or Russian - one can choose. I think that is of major importance. I have developed a project which has been piloted in a number of schools but which will be dropped if it does not get a sponsor. We need a political sponsor as only that will work.