Seanad debates

Thursday, 29 March 2012

Qualifications and Quality Assurance (Education and Training) Bill 2011: Committee Stage

 

1:00 pm

Photo of Sean BarrettSean Barrett (Independent)

I will not delay the House further because this is the amendment we have been discussing for much of the time. Section 28 should be deleted. It is entirely unnecessary. There are universities with degrees dating back hundreds of years which are internationally accepted, have high international status, attract international staff and have high rankings for citations, etc. I was not sure what problem the first Irish Universities Quality Board was attempting to address and I do not know what problem this section is attempting to address either. There is no problem.

On what is the quality of lectures, more people apply to get into the courses than we have places. On whether students did not turn up for lectures, if that were so 500 students would leave the Edmund Burke theatre and one would know immediately. It all happens satisfactorily. The external examiners validate it, the international referees of journal articles accept the articles, the employers employ the graduates and the ones who want to go internationally are accepted at Oxford and Cambridge. One of my colleagues left TCD to go to Oxford recently. His qualifications were accepted, as they say, ad eundum gradum by Oxford.

Why is it that, in addition to satisfying Oxford, Cambridge, etc., one must be responsible to a new quango set up by a country which badly needs to spend money on many other matters? I have spoken to section 28 in the course of the other sections, but it is utterly unnecessary when we need money. We are closing down small rural schools to implement section 28 and the section is entirely unnecessary because there is no problem.

Some within the sector have talked up a problem so they could expand their own bureaucracies. In the lecture theatre, in the academic journals and in the way we relate to students, which is an important consideration for Senators, there are people from the United States and from the Erasmus programme in Europe who tell us that the way lecturers in Irish universities relate to students is far superior to what they find in the European mainland. The quotations the Minister of State gave at the beginning that Irish universities are voted number 1 in terms of acceptability and recruitment are all cited in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report.

There are enough real problems in the country without setting up an agency to deal with matters which are not a problem. It is somewhat of a slur to those who have done the work up to now to see the Government setting up a quango to confirm what we know is fact. It makes one wonder why there is disillusionment with Government when one gets this kind of unnecessary meddling.

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