Mr. Paul Hannigan:

I should declare an interest in that I was in DKIT for ten years before I moved back to Letterkenny in the late 1990s, so I have a great affinity with that institution and I hope it progresses well. I really enjoyed my time in Dundalk.

To come back to the specific issues raised, the points made by Mr. Eastwood are valid in terms of going big and making sure we have ambition around this. Mr. Eastwood was involved in the first meeting of the Derry City and Strabane District Council, and he actually chaired the Derry council group in its infancy and saw things developing from there. I know he has been a very strong supporter of the university in Derry and very supportive of us in Donegal as well. We continue to move in that direction in terms of being ambitious for the region and making sure we are not disadvantaged in that space.

Senator Currie’s comments are very interesting. Coming from the Blanchardstown area, she knows the impact of having a technological university, given there is a campus of Technological University Dublin there. From our perspective in the Connacht-Ulster Alliance, we will be making an application for technological university status. We are completing the submission documents as we speak, and we are in discussions with staff associations and finalising negotiations with them around various different aspects. It is likely we will have the submission document completed before Christmas, with the negotiations with the staff associations, hopefully, completed at the same time, and with a submission ready to go in probably towards the end of January. That is the sort of target we are working towards at the moment. A huge amount of work has been done to develop that.

In the context of the incubation units, there is a very interesting story to be told in the north west city region. We have a centre on campus called CoLab, which has around 60 small companies working in it at the moment, employing over 200 people. The latest extension of that was an INTERREG project with what was the Northern Ireland Science Park at the time, and is now Catalyst Inc. There is an equivalent facility in Derry city, which came from INTERREG funding and which is a sister facility to the one on Letterkenny IT campus, and the Ulster university is very involved with Catalyst Inc. as well. The area around that whole incubation space has been really important for us and we see the benefits of it as we move forward.

As we see developments on both sides of the Border, the synergies will only develop even further between the emerging technological university, the Ulster university and the other partners in the further education space. I have addressed some of the questions and I will leave the issues around the hospitals to Professor Ó Néill.