Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I understand the implementation is absolutely important and we have to get this right. It is fundamental to the future of education. Today we had trade unions and the Union of Students of Ireland, USI, before the committee. They were unable to engage with the economic report and how we might address the underfunding in education. Instead we discussed the effects of underfunding. ICTU spoke of the creeping privatisation of the sector over the past ten years, when the Minister has been in government. The TUI highlighted that in those ten years we have seen student numbers rise 28% while staff numbers fell 8%. The USI highlighted the fact that most universities get more funding from private sources than they do from the State. The Irish Federation of University Teachers, IFUT, raised the fact that in the late 2000s two of our universities were ranked in the top 100 internationally and one was in the top 50. We now have no institutions in the top 100. The fall in the rankings is directly linked to systemic underfunding. The most obvious way in which the underfunding manifests itself is through the student to staff ratio in all the institutions.

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