Ms Josephine Feehily:

TUS has put its toe in the water in the alumni space with some very modest success. It is nothing like the university sector. Dr. Prendergast put his finger on it. It is one of the things I had in mind when I mentioned capacity building. If we are going to go into this line of business, we need professionals to run it. We need to build the capacity. There is not a capacity within the TUs to run that at scale, any more than there is capacity in terms of borrowing. When I talked about building institutional capacity, if we are going to change our business model from being 99.something%-Government funded to something less than that with borrowing and philanthropy, we need a different operating model and a different governance set-up. Apart from anything else, the HEA would expect it. There is a way to go before we would be confident in doing it, but that should not stop us having a conversation about it.

I made a bit of a plea earlier about core funding and getting money into the base. What we can do with discretionary money like that is heavily related to capital or equipment, because it is not recurring. That often expects matching funding and it also then comes back to the borrowing piece. It is kind of all of a piece in some ways. We need to get the funding foundations right. We need a transparent model from the HEA. I am less bothered about precisely how the money is shared out between TUs and universities, as long as it is transparently clear that there is parity of esteem. We must get the foundations right and get it into the base.

Mr. Deenihan mentioned multi-annual funding. We need the certainty of multi-annual funding. We cannot commit to something if it is only going to run for one academic year, which is only nine months. That is one of the things that I am finding really hard to adjust to. Everything stops in June. I am trying to arrange meetings in July and August, and they are all looking at me as if I am mad. Nine months is just too short. We need a commitment to multi-annual funding in the base and then we would have the freedom to start thinking creatively about philanthropy, the governance around it and what it might be used for because it will have to be a one-off. It cannot be funding for pay, for example. It is complex, but it still has to be in the mix in the future.