Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The previous Committee of Public Accounts did some work on this and there is some correspondence which we have agreed would be circulated because there is useful information in it. We have to insist on getting the update. They said some of the responses included overtime and shift work. That is not what we are trying to get at here. We are trying to get at the issue, which came up previously, of a disproportionate amount of precarious employment in a sector. We wanted to see how that would show up in the accounts.

The HEA says it will come back to us with a definition when one is to hand between the universities, the smaller colleges and the institutes of technology. We want to get to that net point about what is the ratio. Essentially, the product of a university is knowledge. It is 1:1, that is, one hour contact to one hour research. We start wondering why our colleges underperform in the rankings and things like that. It will come as a surprise to many people who attend universities how precarious the employment can be for some of those who are delivering lectures. That is the net point we need to get to and I hope that when they come back we set some time aside to give this the attention it needs. There are other aspects in relation to spin-out companies and so on that we need to have another look at. Some things were not closed off from the previous Committee of Public Accounts.