Sean Barrett (Independent)

-----and the Minister of State's Department should do that along with the Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. If we are to get the public finances back in order, this is an area in which we must question much of what happened over the past decade.

I refer briefly to the recent university rankings. Did the quality of lecturing go down? Did the quality of the articles produced go down? The answer to those questions is "No." What happened was that fewer staff taught more students. The Times Higher Education table did not like that but other people call it productivity.

There are 50 higher educations institutions in Boston but no one ever suggested mergers. That is a bureaucrat's solution. Too much of Irish universities' budgets go on bureaucrats who talk to other bureaucrats and too little is spent in the classroom, which is the emphasis we need to get back to. Then we will be a real knowledge economy and not a subsidy guzzling economy like that advocated by Science Foundation Ireland, the IDA and Enterprise Ireland. I thank everyone for their forbearance.