Ms Joan Donegan:

I fundamentally disagree with the Acting Chairman. Obviously, the number of PhD students coming through correlates with the number of students coming into our universities. In 2008 we had 150,000 students. That number went up to 213,000 in 2020, and we expect 240,000 to 250,000 students to come into our universities in 2030. We should be very mindful of that. The funding crisis before Covid and Covid on top of it are absolutely stretching resources within the universities, but the Acting Chairman is quite right that the PhD students are coming through. Our academics have worked really hard through the Covid situation and through that financial crisis to support those students.

The Acting Chairman talked about medtech and Covid and the research that was done in a very short time. I think Professor Luke O'Neill, who was at our conference, would tell the Acting Chairman that but for Covid that funding would not have been given to the universities to study those infections. Because this was a very important economic issue that had to be addressed worldwide and the absolute support for and importance of researchers working on that issue, funding was available. However, academics in the humanities, social sciences and arts would say that is not the situation for them. The reason universities are reaching out to other companies to support them in research is that the funding situation in our universities right now is in crisis. It is not sustainable into the future. Universities cannot survive, depend on or be sustainable on the core funding they are receiving from the Government. If I were to pick any issue out of all the issues that have been raised in our submission, it would have to be funding and the sustainability of universities and third level education into the future. We cannot do this in a real, sustainable way unless we have proper funding. That impacts everything we do.