Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I will not take much of that five minutes. I would like to reiterate, in the presence of the Minister, that if we are to have genuine equality, somebody has to make sure that it is manifest and visible on the campuses, in the student facilities and in terms of staff accommodation. Like most staff members in institutes of technology, I am based in office accommodation that is worse than that available to a postgraduate student in a university. There is no way around this — the two sectors should either be made equal or they should be defined as being unequal. The manifest inequality to which I refer has caused places like Waterford Institute of Technology to look for university status. They believe that such status will draw with it the funding and resources which will give them the appearance of being different and better. If we want to maintain the current differences, so be it.

It would be no harm for the Department of Education and Science or the Higher Education Authority to examine the accreditation of engineering degrees across the entire third level sector. Do the Department and the HEA wonder about the capacity of the underfunded and poorly-built institute of technology in Cork to achieve a level of accreditation that is in excess of that of a neighbouring institution that has vastly greater access to resources and much more tradition and history? Do they wonder why the more maligned sector, which has been accused of inflexibility, a lack of imagination and a failure to use modern pedagogical methods, is more successful?

If the Department and the HEA reflect on such matters, perhaps they will decide to develop a new structure in which the two existing sectors are genuinely equal. It is not just about paying people. If the two sectors were genuinely equal, a student who walks into a campus would not notice whether it is a university or an institute of technology. They do notice such things, however. I can say that because if one compares the geographical origins of students in Cork Institute of Technology with those of students in the neighbouring university, one will discover that one is heavily loaded in the direction of Cork city and the other is heavily loaded outside Cork city. While that pattern is not overwhelming or universal, it undoubtedly exists. I would like to appeal, even before the HEA takes over this matter completely, for criteria to be established to ensure that nobody can tell the difference between the facilities, resources, staff, equipment and student support of an institute of technology and those of a university.

I welcome the Bill, in principle. I look forward to a reasonably imaginative working out of its implications in a manner that does not consign the institutes of technology to a continuing perceptible second place in the pecking order.