John Crown (Independent)

I am sorry for getting here late. I would like to add my thoughts to those which have been expressed already about the need for Senators to be given an opportunity in the near future to discuss the strategy for higher education with the Minister for Education and Skills. Such a debate is necessary in light of this morning's disappointing news that there has been a further attrition in the academic rankings of leading Irish universities. We reached a high water mark in this regard as recently as two years ago when two of our institutions were ranked in the world's top 100, with one of them being in the top 50. We now have none in the top 100.

Rather than putting our hands in the air and bleating for more resources - I accept that additional resources are needed - we should apply some intelligent thinking to this problem, like all others. We need to identify what the problems are and decide how best they might be tackled. This will require people to suspend some of the values that are sometimes disproportionately emphasised at election time. People need to understand that the problem in this country is not a shortage of universities. We are clearly seeing that the universities we have are - for whatever reason - under-resourced, sub-critically sized and sub-critically staffed.

It is generally felt that the reason for the drop in our universities' status this year was the loss from this country of some of its most productive researchers. I refer to those who were producing the greatest numbers of papers, manuscripts and reports, getting the highest numbers of international peer-reviewed grants and securing the greatest status from international research-sponsoring organisations. When a university loses people like that, it loses real metrics like the impact factors of the journals and the citation indexes of the papers that are published, etc. This has a knock-on effect throughout the whole system.

If an institution is perceived as not being a quality institution, it will have more trouble attracting top-quality international funding, faculty and students. These days, students are much more mobile. Some people who are seeking an education in Ireland preferentially may decide to go elsewhere if the university in which they are giving consideration to studying engineering, medicine or law is not considered to have a high international ranking. We need to get the Minister to come in to have a chat with us about this matter. This is one of the classic issues for which the Seanad was designed. There is an opportunity to bring in people who have a different skill set from that of full-time politicians. I am not disparaging such people. Six Members of this House are designated to be here because they have been elected by university constituencies. I accept there is a democratic deficit in the way those seats are derived. If our presence is to mean anything, it should give us an opportunity to have a serious discussion on a strategy for the development of the third-level sector and to try to put remedial steps in place.

I will give an example of what I am talking about. This country has six medical schools, which is approximately two and a half times the number in the US and one and a half times the European average. We recently discovered data that show there are just 60 consultant-level full-time academics across the six medical schools - an average of ten per school. Harvard Medical School has 1,500, which tells us something. We may need to have a serious think about the number of institutions we have here. Without advocating closing any down, we need to forge very definite strategic alliances between those institutions here to reach a critical mass of expertise unimpeded by institutional chauvinism. I join my colleagues in asking the Minister to come to the House to give us an opportunity to discuss these issues.