Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

I will concentrate on the PLC sector and universities. I welcome the opportunity to have a general debate such as this, that does not necessarily relate to specific legislation on education and that the Government provided time for same.

This debate on further and higher education was initially sparked off by the lack of implementation of the McIver report which makes recommendations for the restructuring of the post leaving certificate colleges sector. My constituency has the highest concentration of PLC colleges in the country. Within a mile of my office in Cork are Cork College of Commerce and St. John's Central College, and Coláiste Stiofán Naofa is a little farther away. Very significant funds were spent in those colleges in recent years, which is welcome.

The McIver report arose from the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness and was reaffirmed in the White Paper on Adult Education, Learning for Life. Social partners accepted that PLC colleges cannot continue to operate within a system designed essentially for the second level sector. The McIver report was completed in April 2003, as has been highlighted by speaker after speaker, but its recommendations on supports and structures for the PLC sector have still not been implemented. The TUI met senior officials from the Department on several occasions between the holding of its congress last Easter and September 2005. The Minister of State will know that her Department agreed in principle to the implementation of key aspects of the McIver report on PLC colleges at an agreed implementation cost of approximately €48 million in respect of those colleges with more than 150 students, yet this commitment was not honoured in the last budget.

The PLC sector continues to be increasingly important in educational policy generally. As the Minister of State correctly said, we now live in a very different Ireland from that in which many of us lived ten or 20 years ago. We need to support lifelong learning and those who want to change career, perhaps two or three times in their lives, through reskilling etc. We need to ensure we can adapt the workforce to a constantly changing marketplace, which we certainly have. We should not underestimate the value of the PLC sector to the disability sector and to foreigners who have come to our shores for various reasons and who are adapting to the Irish way of life and preparing themselves to enter the workforce.

I want to call a spade a spade regarding universities in Ireland and want to put the debate into context. Every year there is an academic ranking of world universities and this year's ranking shows that Ireland's top university does not even make the top 80 in the European Union or the top 200 in the world. Ireland's second and third ranking universities, University College Cork and University College Dublin, do not even make the top 170 in the European Union or the top 400 in the world. The figures in this regard have not improved in recent years — if anything, they have disimproved. The unfortunate reality is that Ireland is running to a standstill in its effort to upgrade its universities to meet the standards of the top universities in Europe and the rest of the world. Unfortunately we are not in the higher echelons of global university education and this should change.

This is almost entirely a resources issue. For the past 15 years, fuelling the economy in a positive way has been the priority of consecutive Governments. Low taxation and a highly skilled, well educated workforce have been the main factors in attracting foreign investment to Ireland. One would assume that if we are to keep Ireland competitive as a location for investment and business, those two policies would be prioritised absolutely by a Government with plenty of money to spend. However, this is not the case in the university sector. We are not nearly spending enough to ensure that Ireland moves into the top class in the third and fourth level education sectors.

When one compares the resources available to the Government for spending on universities with those available for this purpose in other forward-thinking EU countries, one will note that the spend per student in Ireland is significantly lower. If Ireland wants to produce top entrepreneurs and the most highly skilled graduates in the world, to which we should aspire, the resources available to our university sector need to increase dramatically. We also need to increase the number of postgraduate courses and, to that end, I recognise the positive change in the mindset of the Government in recent times. I urge it to continue thinking in this way.

If we are to be honest with ourselves in this debate, we must recognise that calling for extra resources for the university sector has consequences. Money will not appear out of thin air and we therefore need to have a realistic debate on funding third level education. There are many models in other EU countries and further afield, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, which the Minister should consider.

The debate on funding should take on board a number of factors. No new structure for financing third level education should discourage students of any economic background from attending third level institutions in the first place. Irish students should not be at a disadvantage as a result of fee-paying foreign students being attracted into Irish universities for the purpose of funding courses therein. Most controversially — this is a personal view rather than a party view — those who benefit from third level education should be asked to make some realistic contribution towards the funding of third level education in the future. There are many ways to achieve this without introducing direct fees. Student unions and university management bodies should be included in the ongoing debate on the funding of third and fourth level education.

Let me raise concerns about the funding of medical courses in Irish universities. It is baffling and totally unacceptable that our medical training system uses as a crutch finances provided by fees from students who come from outside the European Union. The result is that there are caps on the numbers of Irish students in medical courses in our universities to ensure that sufficient numbers of fee-paying foreign students can finance or partially finance those courses. Consequently, Irish students doing their leaving certificates who want to do medicine face unfair competition. There are not enough places on medical courses to train the number of doctors we need and, unfortunately, the lack of resources is such that universities are forced to establish quotas of foreign fee-paying students purely to finance courses. The Ministers for Education and Science and Health and Children should try to resolve this.

My final point, which is perhaps the most relevant to me, concerns the European Union. The resources that will be available for research and development in EU budgets between now and 2013 will be massive, amounting to approximately €70 billion, and this will involve a doubling of the research and development fund over the next seven years. Irish universities and colleges, and other institutes of further education, should be tapping into this budget to ensure they are availing of funding opportunities. Other countries will be doing so and other universities have been more effective in doing so than those in Ireland. We should not allow this to continue.

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