Ms Josephine Feehily:

I was a civil servant too long to be comfortable commenting on policy. Whatever the funding decisions are, core funding is essential and it needs to be clearly additional. One of my concerns, and we had a webinar with the Department around the time of the announcement, is to make sure of that. Any day we get a Minister announcing €307 million is a good day and it has to be welcomed, but I want to know what it is for because if it is pre-empted and outside our control, that could be a problem. If it is pre-empted by pay increases, for example, that is no good to me. It is no good to the universities, if it already pre-empted. Right now, it is a little too opaque for me to have a sense of what the benefit will be. It is about core funding that is clearly additional and in the base. Those committee members who know the Book of Estimates know what that means. The funding needs to get into the base so that it is built on in subsequent years and is not ring-fenced.

Ring-fenced funding in the form of the TU transformation fund, which was mentioned by Mr. Deenihan, has been transformational. That programme is due to end and needs to be renewed for a further three years so there is targeted funding as well as core funding. To get back to the announcement, I was encouraged by the specific commitment in it to a strong developmental agenda for the TUs. That suggests there is at least an openness to positive discrimination, if I might put it like that, in favour of the TUs and recognising where we are coming from. That additionality piece is incredibly important from my point of view.