Mr. Jim Miley:

I will pick up on the capacity constraint issue that Senators Gallagher and Joe O'Reilly raised and the challenges around that. Senator Joe O'Reilly rightly questioned whether this could be viewed as a cynical play for funds. I am reminded of the Oscar Wilde quote that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is very much the value aspect that the system is looking at. We hear a lot of conversation these days about challenges to our corporate tax rate. Whenever that plays out, we will certainly not see an improvement in our competitive advantage. At best, we will hold our own but there could be some slippage. That leaves our talent and innovation capacity as the prime cards we have to play to attract inward investment and in our economic activity. It is no accident that, despite the enormous challenges of Covid over the last 15 months, our tax base has held up really well. It has done so because universities and institutes around the table produced a talent pool for sectors like medtech, biopharma, information and communication technology and agrifood. All the key economic clusters around the countries are supported by the top talent pools produced through higher education. It is very much a value proposition we are talking about.

On capacity, last autumn we faced a major challenge. We have a new Department and Minister and a Government that has made a particular statement about the position in which it sees higher education and research in the economy, which we hugely welcome. We are working closely with the new Department in that regard. All the colleges and universities around the table stepped up to the plate last autumn in finding of the order of 500 extra places, some of which arose from the demographic bulge that is happening because of population surge and some of which arose because of the Covid grades inflation issue and the changes to the leaving certificate. We have seen revised statistics from the Department of Education showing projections for students exiting secondary school over the next decade on the highest end of their original expectations.

On average, we will have an extra 3,000, and probably up to 4,000 or 5,000 in certain years, coming to the doors of Letterkenny Institute of Technology, Dundalk Institute of Technology, UCC, TCD and all the other colleges throughout the country. That is just the Irish students, before we even think about trying to build capacity for Northern Irish, UK or non-EU students. We face a real challenge there.

Going back to the question of what we can do about this, there is a funding issue. I will give the committee one critical statistic in this regard which speaks to the funding and staffing issues. Apart from the funding challenge we have endured in the system over the past decade, we are also subject to the employment control framework, which essentially means that the sector cannot hire additional permanent staff. In 2008, there were 19,300 core-funded - that is, funded through the State grant - staff in the system overall looking after 155,000 students. In 2020, 12 years later, we still had the same number of core-funded staff and they were looking after 213,000 students in the system. That is what the system has done. The fact that we are still producing high-quality graduates and top-notch research is a huge testament to the quality of the staff and the management in our universities and institutes of technology, but we pull the thread very thin. We really welcome the signal from the Government that it will address this matter this year but we now need the voice of this committee in pushing for that funding challenge to be met on a sustained basis over the next decade. If we do that and loosen the strings around the number of permanent staff we can have, I think we will be able to meet those capacity challenges, be they from Irish, UK or Northern Irish students.