Results 14,641-14,660 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: 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: 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: 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: Yes. There are more hurdles to be crossed in building from scratch on a new site.

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 could be. I will be happy to come back and discuss this in some detail. The Deputy has heard me say many times that my nightmare is a child looking into an empty field rather than a schoolyard, largely because somebody does not want to go through the hassle of changing the area development plan or because a planning officer or a traffic control person feels there will be problems. I...

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: I will get a note on that matter. The soaring demand in pupil numbers which, as the Deputy is probably aware, are projected to increase by 70,000 up to the year 2018 is putting extraordinary pressure on the provision of school places, that is, the net number of additional places, as distinct from improvements that would have been characteristic of the minor works grant, from which a total of...

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

Ruairi Quinn: The summer works grant.

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

Ruairi Quinn: On the minor works grant, the note I have states that in 2012 a total of 52 large-scale projects were substantially completed and that it is planned that 113 major school projects will be undertaken on site in 2013. The grant was last issued in November 2011. All of the management bodies were advised that a minor works grant was unlikely to be available in the coming years for the reasons I...

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 understand it was €28 million.

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

Ruairi Quinn: Speaking from memory, many of these were existing scholarships that had no connection with the income status of the recipient. They were on the basis of "first in Ireland" in this or that course and it involved a relatively small or modest amount of money which we decided to allocate to students from disadvantaged backgrounds to address the imbalance in our very unequal society.

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

Ruairi Quinn: If we keep on dipping into dormant accounts, they will stop sleeping, as it were.