Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

My jaw nearly hit the ground when I read this. We have raised issues here on numerous occasions about the use of taxpayers' money by universities and colleges. I wonder whether my alma materhas learned anything. Obviously this is a vast sum of money. That is one thing, and UCC can make its own decisions about it, and it is not what I am questioning. At committee meetings we have had numerous discussions on what is taxpayer funding and what is not. There was a lot of discussion and argument relating to the institutions' own funding, and they stated they could use their own funding in whatever way they pleased. However, the fact of the matter in many cases we saw was their own funding was put into a pot with taxpayers' funding and then utilised, and in many various scenarios we had to try to decipher whether this was value for money for the taxpayer. Here we have a situation where UCC is spending this amount of money and is stating it is from non-taxpayer funded revenue. I would ask the following question. If UCC did not get taxpayers' funding in the first place would it be in a position to go out and get non-taxpayer revenue to be able to do this? The manner in which UCC has explained this smacks of nothing being learned from our report of a few months back and the ongoing analysis on some colleges and universities.