Professor Brian Norton:

The EY report also identified payments of €29.5 million over a three-year period, which were deemed not to have gone through appropriate levels of approval.

DIT assures the committee that these payments for a range of services had full budgetary approval and had been appropriately procured. For example, they included annual rental for DIT buildings, utilities and energy costs, catering contracts, audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General and library resources. These payments now go through the levels of formal approval required by our finance system for all payments under our authority to bind.

A loss of €718,000 was incurred by DIT as a result of the Swets UK bankruptcy. We subsequently procured the required services through another supplier at a cost of €760,000. While the cost is higher, the terms of the new contract do not require full prepayment and therefore reduce the exposure to potential commercial failure. DIT has been excluded from IReL, the Irish Research electronic Library which is funded by the HEA and to date has only been available to universities. Access to this resource would reduce our exposure to the viability of commercial provision. I am pleased to inform the committee that we yesterday received notification that a process is under way to grant DIT access to it.

The scale of the loss incurred by the Swets bankruptcy reflects the scale of the library service in DIT, which accounts for approximately 6% of our annual non-pay expenditure. The service provides access to relevant and current texts, research and related findings for our student population of 20,500 who are pursuing courses at levels from apprenticeship to PhD and our academic staff of over 1,200. The library's extensive resources include 286,000 books, 18,500 dissertations and updated subscriptions to approximately 35,000 online journals, periodicals and databases to support students across a wide range of activities and disciplines and support our research activity.

We currently operate six libraries, which are located in Aungier Street, Kevin Street, Bolton Street, Cathal Brugha Street, Rathmines and Grangegorman. Their dispersed nature adds to costs. This will be alleviated by the development of a single library on the new single DIT campus.

I am delighted to say that despite some recent setbacks, by late 2019 DIT will have 10,000 students on campus at Grangegorman. There are currently 1,200 students, researchers and entrepreneurs on campus and it is already making a very significant contribution to Dublin’s north inner city. Over the next five years, the development of the campus will assist in transforming this part of the city through contributing to the renewal of neglected areas and creating opportunities for educational access, community engagement and economic vitality. Served by the new cross-city Luas line, it will change the map of Dublin.

Finally, I would like to briefly mention technological university legislation. Since the publication of the Hunt report on higher education in 2011 and its adoption as national policy, DIT has been working closely with our partners in IT Tallaght and IT Blanchardstown towards creating a technological university for Dublin. We have successfully gone through stage three of the four-stage application process. We understand that the proposed legislation to enable us to move to stage four may come before the Houses of the Oireachtas in the very near future. We ask members to support this legislation in order that, building on our combined strengths, we can create our new institution to serve the Dublin region.

I thank members for this opportunity to answer any questions they may have. My colleagues and I will endeavour to do so fully and frankly.