Professor Patrick Lonergan:

I will respond to the question about the assaults on the arts. In my university, NUI Galway, the arts have continued to receive a lot of support despite the cuts, for which we are very grateful. That is because the university sees the value of them and understands that one thing that makes Ireland distinctive is our excellence in the creative arts. I have had colleagues working in science who have gone abroad on recruitment missions for students or trade missions with the State and have met people who might not be able to pick out Galway on a map but know who W.B. Yeats is. That identification of Ireland with creativity is very important. There has been an assault not so much on the arts but on the arts degree. We have seen at open days, particularly after 2008, huge numbers of students coming in saying they desperately want to study French or want do a degree that includes IT and archaeology because that is what their passion is but their parents are saying they must not do it. This will have an impact. We have talked a lot about Brexit. Where are the language graduates coming from, given that the number of people doing arts has declined? There are jobs to be created and jobs to be gained from studying the arts. It is something we need to focus on. We need to move away from the model of thinking that there are STEM subjects on one side and the arts on the other. We can be excellent at both. That is what I would like to see us doing.