Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I must declare an interest in this Bill as a staff member of an institute of technology. I assure the Minister of State that my timekeeping in the Cork Institute of Technology is better than it was here today when I arrived late for my allotted slot.

Regarding Senator Ormonde's comments on the campaign to turn Waterford Institute of Technology into a university, I would prefer to have the status of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology than of any university. It is time we moved away from titles. The priorities are resources, range and achieving a high level of performance. To a degree the obsession with the name "university" holds us back. It is an increasingly difficult one to justify on the basis of any objective criteria. Apart from the very worthy and estimable work in the area of the liberal arts I am not sure what distinguishes a university from an institute of technology, or what should except perhaps the spectrum of courses.

I welcome the Bill but I want to make a few, hopefully pointed, remarks. The regional technical colleges, RTCs, which are now the institutes of technology showed an extraordinary level of imagination and flexibility. I bridle at private sector commentators, who talk about some imagined reluctance to change. This apparently applies also to Government negotiators, to judge by the contents of the proposed agreement, Towards 2016. The RTCs reinvented their remit two or three times over the past 30 years. They also responded with extraordinary flexibility to every new need and demand.

In regard to my subject area, engineering, I did not have a cosy public sector job in which one could do as one liked. This applies not only to my place of work but to others. If one teaches engineering one must get the expensive resources to do so. No private sector third level institutions run courses in science or engineering because that is too expensive and requires the input of the State. They do literary or other courses such as law and business that involve note-taking and writing.

To run an engineering course requires the faith of the job market and that into which most of the institutes of technology feed is the multinational one. The recruitment policy of this market is not based on the title or status of the institute from which one graduated but on the quality of what one knows and can do. The institutes and regional technical colleges have been remarkably successful in that respect. In addition, in engineering, about which I know, the college must achieve international accreditation. To achieve that a group of people from outside one's institute, not picked by the institute, and over whose numbers and names it has no control, conduct an extraordinarily rigorous evaluation.

In a nastier moment a couple of weeks ago I said I would lay odds that nobody in either the Department of Finance, which pulls all the strings or the Department of Education and Science, whose strings the Department of Finance often pulls, was ever subjected to the type of rigorous, external, transparent, publicly reported evaluation of his or her capacity to do his or her job that anybody lecturing in engineering in an institute of technology undergoes.

It is a bit rich for the Department of Finance to insert into Towards 2016 language about modern methods and flexibility, etc. We were doing flexibility before the Department of Finance ever heard the term. We did innovation before the Department of Education and Science knew what it was. The single biggest obstacle to the objectives listed in Towards 2016, like flexibility and new pedagogic methods, is the absence of resources.

I would be delighted, for example, to use computer-based learning, except that although we have a certain number of computers a level of computer equipment would be required in every classroom that nobody would dream of funding. I am supposed to teach by modern technological methods with 1990s technology. Where we have attempted in my workplace to introduce modern teaching methods, for example using computer-based projectors, the projectors are stolen because the Department of Education and Science refuses to allow the institutes of technology to have permanent night security.

The students of Cork have wonderful projectors for watching DVDs at weekends at the expense of taxpayers. We were told it was a great idea to invest in such equipment — I agreed it was a great idea — but we were are not allowed to have the equipment, however. I had been using e-mail for years before the Department of Education and Science was able to spell the word. The staff in the institute of technology, who have been most flexible and imaginative, are fed up because people are telling them they are not being flexible and they need to be more flexible. Their contracts state they must teach at any time between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., five days a week, and they must work at night, as appropriate, without any debate, although they get time and a half for such hours. They have been flexible. They invented flexibility. They taught the universities about flexibility. That is why they will vote overwhelmingly to reject Towards 2016. It is not about money per se.