Dr. Joseph Ryan:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I thank him for his gracious comments about his colleague, Senator Malcolm Byrne, who has worked very closely with us in higher education and brings that insight, which we all very much appreciate.

The Deputy asked a fair question about the overall running costs. Both Mr. Miley, Professor Hegarty and I work very closely in European alignments and utilise the OECD, so there are benchmarking exercises. Rather than make the case here, we will supply the figures to the committee. We would make the argument that Ireland has been losing ground and we are comparing like with like. Having said that, there is an awful lot that we do well in Ireland and we should be very proud of that. The work of this committee has been hugely to the fore in supporting that and we very much appreciate that.

We should consider the ratios in 2007, before the downturn happened, and then look at the costing. It has been acknowledged that funding increased in recent years but we are still not back to where we were and that has an impact on real lives, access, etc.

I will briefly discuss the attrition point. That was one of the big concerns as we hit Covid and it was difficult for us to get a picture around that. Again, with the support of the Minister on the national training group, we did a lot of work to get a better picture. I am pleased to say, and we can provide the figures, that it is a far better picture than one may have imagined it would be. Maybe it could be argued that, in a time of Covid, what else would one be doing. Emigration was not possible and there was no work outside, etc. Equally, it goes back to the services point that, I think, was made by Senator Byrne. The fact that the services were there for students was a huge part in keeping the connection. That is not to deny the point we made previously that Covid exacerbated inequalities. If someone did not have Wi-Fi or a laptop or there were too many people in the family trying to use the only computer or the only table, those were the sorts of things that pointed to inequality. It meant that we had to try to roll out, with the assistance of the Government, a lot of direct support to keep the attention of students and to keep them supported.