Ms Annette Dolan:

If I may come in at this point, I think what the Senator is referring to is the whole social dimension of higher education. That is now set out in an annexe to the Rome Communiqué which is part of the Bologna Process to which the various Ministries, including the Irish Ministry, have signed up. Provisions should be put in place in order that no matter the area or postal code one in which a person lives and no matter whether the person is a Traveller, a refugee, an asylum seeker or from a socio-economically deprived background, he or she should be able to access higher education. However, that does not happen when the person does the leaving certificate. The whole process of giving individuals the opportunity to go to higher education has to start when the child is one, two or three years of age. The supports need to be in place within preschool, primary and post-primary to enable participation in higher education because, otherwise, we will continue to have the same level of participation in the north inner city or in rural areas which currently have poor representation. That is certainly something that could be done.

I will finish replying to the question I started addressing earlier. The technological universities are reaching out to the needs of communities within those regions as well as the needs of business and industry and they are considering what is needed for the development of those communities. As all present are aware, higher education institutes have transformed the areas in which they have been sited. It is to be hoped that the technological universities will transform the regions in which they are placed.