Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief in the interests of time. Precarious employment is a real challenge in the third level sector. To address it we must fund the sector properly and look at the employment control framework. We have student-staff ratios in this country of approximately 20:1 and the European norm is 14:1 or 15:1. We announced €307 million in funding yesterday to plug the gap in core funding, and that has been welcomed by the sector. They want to see the delivery but the figure has been welcomed and it will get us to the levels we need of 15:1. That is how we will address precarious employment. Representatives of the sector will be here later and they will make the point that the employment control framework is a piece of this issue and we will work our way through that with them.

The Senator mentioned female presidents. We have five technological universities in Ireland as of this week and three of them - a majority - have female presidents. I was just looking at the traditional universities. When I started in this role, there were no female presidents of universities, so it just shows the pace of change in the sector. There is now a female president at both the University of Limerick and Maynooth and there is a female provost at Trinity. She is the first and it only took more than 400 years but she is doing a super job. I hope when Ministers come before this committee in future they will not have to remark how great it is to see that progress and it will just be the norm. It is significant progress and change has come fast in the end.