Professor Vincent Cunnane:

We just completed the international panel review for the Athlone Institute of Technology-Limerick Institute of Technology consortium. We await the outcome, hopefully some time in March. We got very little feedback on that but we did get one bit of feedback from the international panel, which met a lot of stakeholders with whom the panel was very impressed because the engagement of the potential of a technological university with external stakeholders is so high. Mr. Hannigan made a very important point. The technological universities are redefining the regions of Ireland. In a sense, the midlands and the mid-west will become a new region that nobody will call the mid-west or midlands. Whether it is the south east or the CUA, these things are being redefined based around not geographical limitations but access to the technological university sector and what that means. Ask Joe McGrath of Tipperary County Council about the impact of hopefully soon having university towns in Clonmel or Thurles or ask Clare County Council about the impact of a university town in Ennis, never mind Athlone - Limerick obviously already having a university. As these are real, deep, meaningful and transformative outcomes of technological university activity, a new chapter remains to be written in terms of regional development in this country.