Dr. Joseph Ryan:

The Senator's question is very well put. A bit like Mr. Miley, and I do not want to sound defensive, it is not about administration and looking after the administration. It is a question of whether it is sustainable to do something like this.

If I could approach it from the direction of the Senator's principles, I was with him on principles 1 and 2 but I was missing principle 3. I was thinking there was something else in there, namely, something about the individual, the development of the individual, actually getting the individual innate talents and how they are brought out, not to a curriculum, and how that might be captured. If we were to think about that for a second, that, to some extent, actually gets you into that sort of interview piece or individual piece. It is like those old stories of someone arriving into Oxford and sitting down with some old professor who would ask some daft question like, "Why are elephants big?" On the quality of that answer, the person's course was decided.

I was a registrar for the best part of two decades and would have worked with all colleagues on the CAO system. We were in Galway looking at all this. No more than I was saying in my statement earlier, most programmes are very straightforward. One can manage demand and supply very equitably. You try to give cross-generational fairness to that as well. It is very carefully managed.

The difficulty is in respect of a very small number of programmes, which is my point. I bring it back, then, to the interview piece and whether the proposal the Senator is making is proportionate to where the difficulty is and where the problem might seem to be.