Dr. Patrick Prendergast:

Philanthropy will be very interesting. In my previous job in TCD, we were very successful with philanthropic fundraising. I hope that in a few months, perhaps when we get governance issues straightened out, we will have a conversation about that in SETU to see where we can go and if we can develop a philanthropic fundraising unit within the university. It is one of the big differences between the financing of universities and technological universities. Only 40% of Trinity College's revenue is from the Exchequer, the rest of it is commercial revenue, research revenue and philanthropy, whereas the non-Exchequer component of SETU's revenue is much smaller.

The Chairman is correct that there is an opportunity to grow, but it does mean that the technological universities, and SETU anyway, are more dependent on Government funding than the traditional universities because we do not have the same access to philanthropy, commercial revenue and research revenue. The best way to put it is that it is early days when it comes to philanthropy at least in SETU and the TUs overall. We are in a process and on a road to do more of it, and to get more commercial revenue by doing things jointly with industry, as the Chairman outlined, in particular on course development. As the years go by, I expect we will see non-Exchequer revenue streams increase into TUs, but as it stands at the moment, we are very much reliant on public sector, Exchequer funding, as we discussed earlier.