Professor Brian Norton:

I am grateful for the kind comments on Grangegorman, but I stress that it is not an end but a means to an end. One of the ends is the idea of new routes and new opportunities in higher education. Students should be aware of other opportunities and be able to grasp them. New programmes can then emerge that begin to combine languages and different disciplines. The Grangegorman project is about creating the flexibilities that enable institutions such as DIT to continue with the strong traditions the Deputy identified earlier.

As sadly I am not Irish I do not feel the capacity to comment on the Irish language issue, except to make the observation that in other jurisdictions where second languages are taught, that second language is taught in such a way as to get a facility for the acquisition of language. There may be something in the way that the Irish language is taught that creates an ability to acquire other languages and their understanding. That is often why one ends up with a multilingual situation elsewhere. That might be a comment out of ignorance more than anything else.

I wish to reiterate some of the earlier points about dropout rates. It relates to maths ability and additional points requirement, and it is about motivation. DIT, for example, has a very professional learning teacher technology centre that works with colleagues in a particular discipline, looking at the pattern of assessment, how students engage, etc., to ensure they are fully engaged in their studies. Most of the dropout is in the first semester of the first year and it is about adjustment from second level to third level and finding oneself. After that it is very low.

Dr. Connor mentioned that there are many more places in conversion courses. In previous rounds, for example, where there have been other providers which have not had a complete uptake of places, some of them have been transferred to DIT so that demand has taken up. We would do as much in the conversion area as resources would permit and there are always resource limits to these things.