Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will add my voice to what my colleagues have said. Sinn Féin is in support of this legislation. Nobody would be against good governance, particularly in higher education. There are obviously issues of accessibility and Deputy Conway-Walsh has already spoken about some of the proposals that were made by Sinn Féin during pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, particularly relating to the cross-Border aspects. As much as we welcome the increase in board sizes and so on, there is still a need to deal with the issue of trained union representation.

I do not think it will come as a shock that I am going to raise the issue of Dundalk Institute of Technology, DkIT. A significant proportion of the Deputies who spoke previously in this debate have welcomed the moves that have been made on the status of technical universities in the south east, TUS and the Atlantic Technological University. DkIT is, unfortunately, not in that bracket. We are, unfortunately, now at a stage where there is an impact on people who are making determinations about whether to go to DkIT. People looking at their CAO forms can see they can apply to a technical university. It is the case that a rose by another name will not work. There is a need for the benefits that come from technical university status but beyond that, even at its simplest, DkIT is now hurting because it has not been made a technical university.

I know that DkIT was slow to the dance. I think the Minister has used that terminology. The difficulty is that even if a conversation were to begin with some of these technical university consortia, it would take a considerable amount of time before they are willing or able to operate a section 38 to allow DkIT in. The difficulty with that is there might be a significant number of decisions to be made which might not suit Dundalk in their outworking. That is something that needs to be done.

A considerable amount of work is being done in DkIT, which is a vital entity. I know the Minister spoke about visiting DkIT in January. He said he would deal with the Oireachtas Members for the area. That is an absolute necessity and I will be following up on it.

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