Dr. Patrick Prendergast:

I would pick up on a few of these points because Senator Gallagher raised the issue of the industry levy, which is one of the things in the Cassells report. Would this create undue influence? I would say "absolutely not". We want interaction and engagement with industry. It would be a positive thing that this levy would encourage and engage that interaction between universities and industry. It would probably answer some of the questions Deputy Burton and others have asked about employability and whether we are developing courses that give young people what they need to get jobs in the modern economy. That is very important.

Deputy Nolan raised the issue of access. We are hitting our targets on access and are determined, among the universities, to increase participation. All the universities here have their own specific schemes. In Trinity, we have a Trinity access programme but that is just what we call it. Others call it different things. It is not just to encourage but to provide a modality for young people from backgrounds where the secondary education may not be as good to access university education. That works very well and we want to continue working with that and partnering with Government to ensure it works. Currently, philanthropy plays a large part in that, which is good, but we could have even more support from Government in achieving that. I come back to the Donald Trump thing. Many countries have not focused on this enough. It is one of the problems they have. In fact, we realised much earlier on that we need to focus on it and we have. We need to redouble our efforts to ensure that all the talent of the country finds its way into our higher education institutions.