Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

I thank Senator Burke for raising this matter on the Adjournment. I will respond to him on behalf of the Minister for Education and Science. The Senator is well aware that the Lyons Estate belongs to University College Dublin. The day-to-day management of UCD, which is an autonomous body, is a matter for its governing authority. The college authorities are free to dispose of lands and property acquired prior to the passing of the Universities Act 1997 without recourse to the Minister for Education and Science. They are, however, required to agree terms with the Minister to reimburse Exchequer funds which were used to acquire lands and properties after the passing of the 1997 Act. As the Lyons Estate was acquired in the 1960s, the college authorities are free to do what they want with it.

As Senator Burke said, the Lyons Estate was acquired to provide a field experiment and teaching facility for UCD's faculty of agrifood and the environment. The estate originally comprised approximately 1,200 acres, including Lyons House. The college authorities disposed of the house and approximately 620 acres of land in the early 1990s. Since then, the research farm has provided research and teaching facilities for the faculties of agrifood and the environment and veterinary medicine. However, most faculty teaching and research activities are based on the main UCD campus at Belfield, where there are additional laboratories for food science, computer equipment and a modern lecture theatre. The primary responsibility of UCD's governing authority, which was established under the Universities Act 1997, is to guide the strategic direction of the university. The university has consolidated most of its activities at Belfield in recent years. The school of veterinary medicine was relocated to the Belfield campus in 2003. A 90-acre horticulture facility, which is located between Lucan and Leixlip, was sold to a local authority in 2004 to be incorporated into its programme of general amenities for the area.

The future of Lyons Estate is being reviewed within the college of life sciences as the next step in the UCD strategic planning process. The governing authority approved the initiation of the review at its meeting on 21 March last. It is intended that the review will consider the appropriateness of the current scale of the farm as a centre for teaching and research, the accessibility of the farm to the students, who are entirely based at Belfield, and the impact of the new veterinary school at Belfield, which incorporates a fully operating veterinary hospital and significantly increased state-of-the-art animal holding facilities. Most important, the review will consider the changing focus of undergraduate teaching programmes, particularly in the school of agriculture, and the altered physical facilities required as a result of the new directions being taken by research in these areas. The university has developed the view that it can be impractical to operate an institutional farm facility in an area of rapidly increasing urbanisation. Senator Burke might be glad to hear that the review is expected to take approximately 12 months to complete.