Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Chair has given me flashbacks of the smell of lasagne on the Waterford to Cork bus on a Sunday night. I plead the Fifth on whether it was me. This brings me to my first point. We were talking about the impact that working has on students' grades. The south-east and north-west regions have traditionally suffered from many students travelling outside those areas to access third level education. A great transfer of wealth is involved in that. Something I have never seen quantified is the impact that working has on students' grades. Perhaps those data exist, and I have not seen them. I wonder if there are grade implications, for example, if someone from Waterford accesses education in Cork, lives in student accommodation and makes his or her own dinners and whatever else, rather than having the dinner handed to him or her before an examination, the washing done or whatever else. We know that grades follow through into income expectations in later life and this feeds into the discussions we are having about the cost of living. I hope the technological university model will help to address some of the education deficits in the north west and south east, but some students will still choose to travel outside those regions.

Following up on the ICL loans, as well as the social capital concern I raised earlier, we also have a culture of emigration and, hopefully, return. If students have debt waiting for them in Ireland, will that dissuade them from repatriating?

I agree with Professor Rogers on the issue of Ukrainians. For that reason, it is important that this committee addresses how our education system is going to deal with the influx of Ukrainians. Something that should be borne in mind in respect of third level education is that none of us knows how long it will take for the conflict to play out in Ukraine. We are very much hoping that Ukrainian children who arrive here will be seeking to return within a shortish timeframe. However, we can expect people who arrive and access third level education here to stay, and I hope they will stay, which would extend the timeframe involved to three or four years. That must be considered.

I an also conscious that we have only spoken about State funding today. We did not talk about private or philanthropic funding. This speaks to a point Professor Rogers made about the freedom of the third level sector to educate people to access jobs and roles, as opposed to doing applied research. If private funding is accessed to design a course, is that going to limit our education outcomes? This is much too broad a question to address now, but what role is private and philanthropic funding playing in our third level sector? Is that affecting the educational outcomes and the decisions we make in respect of designing educational outcomes as well? That is more than enough questions for five minutes.