Results 4,381-4,400 of 19,032 for speaker:Ruairi Quinn

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: I thank the Deputy. To add to other factors to which I did not refer, even though very little activity and development is taking place, a lot of landowners saw that at the height of the boom property was worth X. For emotional or personal banking reasons they still think it is worth X. We are the only buyer in town. If the State or a local authority is involved there can be a perception...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: I have a note on PPPs. There are 15 PPP schools currently in operation located throughout the State. There are a further eight schools, bundle 3, in construction, and two further bundles, 4 and 5, announced by the Government to proceed last July. These bundles will deliver a total of 12 schools. The vast majority of schools delivered through the PPP process are post-primary schools...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: I am subject to correction but we have engaged other agencies like the VECs, the OPW and the National Development Finance Agency to implement our building programme. We identified the schools, where they are located and what their capacities are. As a result of the sheer scale of the problem the feeling in the Department was that we did not have the resources to do all of this ourselves....

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: Mr. Jerome Kelly may have that figure. We will revert to the Deputy. If we cannot get the figure now, we will get it to him in writing. I understand the school would do it.

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: That is a very interesting question. Lord David Puttnam has been Chancellor of Open University for some years. He is a Labour peer.

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: Yes, but I did not realise that until I was at the ASTI conference in 2011, where he was one of the speakers. He announced that he is Irish by choice, whereas most of the other people in the room were Irish by accident. I have got to know him reasonably well since then and he makes the point that Open University was an obsession of Harold Wilson's in the Labour Cabinets between 1964 and...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: It possibly has. I am not so aware of plans for it to come formally onto the third level landscape of the Republic's educational system.

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: According to the note I have here this provision covers miscellaneous expenses arising at third level, as well as funding for certain cultural organisations. The subhead provided funding for Springboard initiatives in 2012. The reduced allocation in 2013 mainly reflects the decision to transfer this funding to the national training fund, the NTF, which will now contain almost all such...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: I thank Deputy O'Brien for his questions and for his non-partisan support for measures which he independently judges to be good. He is very public in his support for them and I appreciate that. We have several problems and I have taken quite an interest in this, given my own background as an architect and that I worked in that area. We had problems, which we have now solved to a certain...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: I beg the Deputy's pardon. That is something we all share. The city manager or county manager will tell the equivalent administrative person that the council will facilitate the project and that message goes down the line until it reaches the planning officer, who says there is a local area plan in the draft plan - this was driven by the Celtic tiger - such that in an area to be developed...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: There are several questions to address and I will try to answer all of them and get Deputy McConalogue the information as well. The first question was why there has been the significant drop in the funding of the universities and the institutes of technology. This reduction is mainly the result of the decision in the 2012 budget to reduce the once-off funding by 2% for 2013 and in addition...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: As a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, the Chairman knows more about the matter than I do. What I have been told by Trinity people in the past four to five weeks is that its access programme is the oldest in any of the universities.

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: I hear what the Chairman is saying. Perhaps she might like to invite its representatives to appear before the committee and ask them to account for it.

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: Yes, it is. The previous Government and, in particular, the then Minister of State, Mr. Batt O'Keeffe, recognised that the promotion of education in Ireland on a global scale needed to be undertaken by a dedicated agency. There was a commitment to do this in the programme for Government. He saw Enterprise Ireland in operation in China in promoting Ireland and Irish companies. A decision...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: There is. I think it is to occur over five years, but I will get the precise details. It is aspirational. There are many factors over which we do not have control and Ireland is not a cheap destination in which to study.

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: This whole area comes under the remit of the Higher Education Authority in the first instance. The universities approached the Government to explain that their pension fund provisions were no longer adequate. I am speaking in general terms. When they merged their pension fund provision for university academics and staff into the Civil Service sector, in effect, they automatically came...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: I will ask Minister of State, Deputy Ciarán Cannon, who has responsibility in this area, to address that question.

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: I agree with the Chairman. Where we have centres of educational excellence, for whatever reason, we should celebrate them and not try to squeeze them back into the box from which they came. That does not make sense. It is part and parcel of why the higher education strategy referred to regional clusters of education. Ballyfermot is unique because 60% of the courses it offers are in the...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: It is approximately the same. I am told it is slightly more but the principle is the same. When somebody says that I allocated only 10,410 while there were 10,575 last year, it does not mean there is a drop as the reserve is kept for late applicants. We have made a budgetary provision of 10,575 SNAs for the year, and that is protected. If this is not drawn down and is not needed, there...

Committee on Education and Social Protection: Select Sub-Committee on Education and Skills: Vote 27 - Education and Skills (Revised) (13 Jun 2013)

Ruairi Quinn: Not necessarily. In 2010, the allocation was 10,543. In 2011, it was 10,320. The provisional figure for the period to the end of 2012 was 10,390.