Mr. Paul Hannigan:

I will respond to Senator D'Arcy's question about whether we are happy with the landscape document published by the Minister. Mr. Cummins and I are at a disadvantage in that the report issued as we were heading here and, therefore, we have not yet had an opportunity to read it. However, I would like to correct the front page article in The Irish Times this morning, which said three technological universities were approved by Cabinet yesterday and an application from GMIT, Sligo IT and Letterkenny IT was refused. That is news to me because we did not make an application to be turned down. That is a major inaccuracy.

I will refer to the broader report shortly but there was a major missed opportunity. Two higher education strategies were developed over the past two years. The national higher education strategy in the Republic of Ireland was published in January 2011 and, in the middle of last year, the Northern Ireland higher education strategy was published. Having spoken to those developing the strategy on both sides of the Border, I thought there was a great opportunity at that stage to have a common chapter within both strategies to address cross-Border issues, including student mobility and so on. That did not happen. Paragraph 5.7 on page 23 of the Northern Ireland strategy refers to "cross-Border co-operation and student mobility". That is the extent of the commitment to cross-Border activity in the strategy. Our national higher education strategy contained commitments about collaboration between institutes of technology and universities in Northern Ireland. We were particularly interested in that because, at the time, we were pursuing a close collaboration with the University of Ulster. Those opportunities remain. There is a possibility that both strategies could be revisited and there could be an overlap. A common element could be developed within them because it is crazy that they are both developing with no overlap at all. Given both were developed at the same time, this does not make sense. That is where there should have been an engagement by the HEA to ensure that occurred. From the point of view of colleges in the Border region, we would have been dealing with an entirely different context because we would have had something specifically to work with.

We are engaged in rearguard action now where we are trying to redress the strategies that have been published and to examine the issues causing difficulty for student mobility and other elements of collaboration, to retrofit them in the strategies. That was a missed opportunity to commit to cross-Border collaboration generally and specifically in higher education. However, it is something the joint working group we propose could revisit and in which it could engage in a more proactive way. It seemed like the simplest thing in the world from my perspective, but obviously our comments at the time fell on deaf ears.