Professor Patrick Lonergan:

I am grateful to the committee for giving us a chance to speak to the members. I am a professor of drama at NUI Galway and I would like to provide a snapshot of how things are for us, how the cuts have affected our students in particular and to set out what we can do into the future. As a lecturer, I see the human cost of higher education cuts on a daily basis. The number of students experiencing difficulties has increased significantly at a time when we are struggling to fund support services. We are seeing falling numbers of access students, evening students and mature students because of child care costs, mortgages, transportation costs and many other barriers. Postgraduate study is now closed off completely to very large numbers of people for financial reasons. I ask the members to think about that in the context of second-level teaching and what we heard from Mr. Cassells about how social class has emerged as a factor in who gets to do postgraduate study and who does not. All of this is a clear example of how things are in the wider university system now. All of those involved, which is to say staff, students and parents, are working incredibly hard and doing their best but they are doing their best to just about manage. It has become very difficult to do any more than that.

There is a great deal more, however, that we could do. Looking at my own area, we want to work to a much greater extent with our own communities. One of the things about drama is that it is a very powerful medium to connect to parts of our society that have become isolated. It can give a voice to those who do not have one. Researchers in my department have gone into primary schools to work with children whose parents have immigrated here and whose first language is not English. They have worked with infants who are at risk of neglect and they have worked with adults with intellectual disabilities. This research attracts attention from all around the world but it also makes lives better here in Ireland. We have been able to do this because we went out and got competitive research funding for it and we will continue to do that. However, it would be great if we could put those kinds of activities on a sustainable footing and integrate this fully into our curriculums so that all of our students have opportunities to engage in these kinds of service learning activities.

We also want to do more to contribute to the creation of jobs, not just in the west of Ireland but nationally. Within my own field, corporations in the USA are increasingly recruiting graduates in the creative arts because they see their skills in teamwork, problem solving and creativity in general. Ireland is famed internationally for its creativity and for the creative arts. As such, there is a great deal we could do to work with industry to develop that area. Galway is going to be the capital of culture in 2020 which is an enormous opportunity for the west and the entire nation in terms of reputation and job creation. Looking at the humanities generally, we can see that if Ireland is to cope with Brexit, we need more graduates with language skills. That can only happen with investment in the humanities.

To conclude, I note that my students are brilliant. They are creative, confident, hardworking people and we want to do the best for them that we possibly can. Everyone in higher education wants to do that. As a sector, we want to do more than just cope. We want to do more than just manage. We could potentially even thrive but to do so we need action and we need it now.