Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this topic. I welcome also the establishment of the Department and the focus on third level and higher education. The third level experience presents people with the opportunity to broaden their horizons and gain additional skills, and it is transformative in its nature. A central theme needs to be around access and ensuring that all people, particularly people from disadvantaged backgrounds, have access. I am thinking in particular of access programmes and postgraduate entry. Several students have contacted me in recent weeks to outline the particular difficulties they are experiencing at this time in regard to postgraduate medicine and other courses which require a less conventional route through third level.

I note the Minister's efforts to support the institutions in the very important work they do and the contribution they make. I am a third level student myself on the Structured Population and Health-services Research Education, or SPHeRE, PhD programme. Given his former capacity as Minister for Health, the Minister will know that NPHET and other groups such as HIQA are currently relying heavily on graduates from that programme in regard to population health epidemiology. It is very important that we appreciate the value of those contributions.

In terms of the effort to undertake basic research, I sometimes find academia can spend a lot of time having to justify its own existence and I want to make the point about the principle of basic research and its importance. I also want to make the point about the opportunity for the new Department in regard to the role of the State in innovation. There is sometimes an idea that it is for big pharma or for the private sector to take on and do this creative work. Mariana Mazzucato and others have written about the entrepreneurial state, which is something we should be ambitious for because we need to take risks in our research. I commend that approach and implore the Minister to take it up.

I want to raise the issue of this year’s first-year students. I mentioned how going to third level education can broaden horizons. Many people come from a local parish or town and are subjected to new influences and meet people from a wide range of backgrounds, which can be very liberating, if messy at times for some people. However, with Covid-19, that has been completely restricted. I received a letter from a parent who happens to be a primary school teacher married to a primary school principal, and who encourages the Minister to contact third level institutions and ask them to look at every opportunity to get young adults on campus. Parents say they are living in their bedrooms with a laptop. That is the experience they are having in first year, which is very different from the first year experience of their predecessors. It is very tough on them and is affecting their mental health and their development. I ask the Minister to consider the opportunities there are to get kids on campus more often.

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