Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The bottom line is that I could not stand over this statement. I am not going to accept this. We have been down the road on this a number of times. I raised another issue in respect of the Cork Opera House, which they are now funding under own funded sources or whatever phrase they use.

The issue here is that there is an extra pension liability as a result of legal challenges to decisions that were made by the college. As a consequence, that has to be met by the university and paid for proportionately out of that whole pie of funding by the taxpayer. That is the bottom line here. We need to get to the bottom of why we ended up in this scenario on these pensions from this university. What professional decisions were made on employment that resulted in people getting their legal entitlements - I have no issues with that - ending up in court and winning?

Ultimately it is the taxpayer who pays. I do not buy any of this rubbish about non-taxpayer funded sources. They should be banned, in my opinion. It all goes into one pot. The total taxpayer-related funding could be 60%, 70% or whatever. Whatever the net cost to the taxpayer of an issue like this because of decisions they made, it is proportionately being paid in that amount by the taxpayer in the first place. We need to ask questions about this and dig into it. The taxpayer is ultimately funding the majority of this bill. It is not non-taxpayer related funding.