Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I would like to talk about a few aspects of the Bill. A section near the end of the Bill relates to "hiring and firing", which is an awful phrase. The great illusion in the public sector is that the big problem with management in that sector is that people cannot be hired and fired in the way they can be hired and fired in the private sector. No well-managed private company would operate the system of arbitrary hiring and firing that some illusionists in the public sector seem to believe is needed. That is one of the reasons I am not as worried about the issue of tenure as are some other people. It is a pity that a target was put in place in this way.

Similarly, the nonsense of two equal and different sectors of third level education is denied by the experience of the staff of the institutes of technology. I have to relearn how I teach and what I teach on a regular basis. I have to counsel students. I am now supposed to do research, apparently, and I enjoy doing so when I have time. I am supposed to do all of that in an office that is no bigger than a chicken coop, which is in a second-hand prefab that is 25 years old and for which no replacement provision has been made.

I am supposed to persuade students to come to work in that environment, as opposed to the university down the road which seems to have limitless funds to provide ever improved faculty buildings and accommodation. I forgot to mention PMDS, which the Department of Education and Science loves. Given that we have reinvented our course four times and received international accreditation three times, it is nonsense to suggest we are falling behind in some way. Somebody invented terms like PMDS to try to justify inadequate management who cannot manage things properly.

I will raise an issue that I would like the Minister, Deputy Hanafin, to take up. I work in an institute of technology that is in the vicinity of a university. The institute was refused permission to apply to offer nursing degrees, for example, because it was too close to the university in question. The same argument was also used in the case of Limerick, even though the university there does not have a medical faculty. Somebody in the Department decided it was better to offer nursing degrees in universities. The institute of technology where I work has to live with a predatory university that sees what is successful in the institute, and then copies and undermines it. This is going on all over the country — institutes of technology are being blamed when universities copy and undermine their successes.

If the Minister wants to do something about the concept of equality, she needs to ensure that all campuses look equal and feel the same, and that the good ideas which are developed in third level institutions are treated in accordance with the OECD report. The OECD recommended that when good ideas evolve in a certain area, predatory institutions which have more flexibility because they are nominally private should not be allowed to cream off the most attractive of them. Universities should not be allowed to undermine well-established courses in institutes of technology.

I will conclude by simply saying that the words which are used in Towards 2016 are offensive to people who, in my view, showed a level of flexibility long before the Department of Education and Science discovered the word.