Sean Barrett (Independent)

Senator John Crown is here for that purpose. In the printing of the Bill, the line numbers may have been changed. I think the amendment I am seeking to introduce is on page 22, lines 15 and 16, rather than line 25, in case I cause unnecessary distress in various offices in trying to amend something that is not in place. The second amendment is on page 27, lines 5 and 6, the third amendment has moved to page 44, line 37, and the last amendment is on page 69, line 43. As the Leas-Chathaoirleach mentioned, there has been much rearranging of sections.

I see lecturing as a quite a simple task. A podium is in place and there are up to 400 people in the audience should anything happen. We have made it unduly bureaucratic in the Bill. I am trying to take out one of the layers of bureaucracy from it. That is the key point. In regard to my report back on an external examiners meeting, all the external examiners were from outside the jurisdiction and all were very pleased at what was said. That has also been the experience of Erasmus programme students. They have said there is a much greater level of attention and interest in students in Irish universities than in their home universities on the mainland, and American students have told us the same thing.

I question the need to involve the Higher Education Authority with all the other groups I mentioned who are involved. It makes it unnecessarily complex and expensive at a time when the important question is whether people, up to 400 in many cases, know anything more in the following April or May than when they joined the course in September and if they were carefully guided through all the work by good lecturers. The answer is an overwhelming "yes". Therefore, I wonder about the involvement of the Higher Education Authority. What was the reason for abolishing the Irish Universities Quality Board? What was the problem with it, at a time when funds are tight, as the Minister reminds us frequently, and why the need to take this particular route?

The Minister mentioned Bologna. The Bologna impact on the courses on which I lecture was to reduce the number of courses from five to four. We dropped the dissertation and the general paper. The people who did the work, who had produced the graduates, were told by people outside the system that they had to drop either the dissertation or a general paper. As I said to the Minister of State - the general paper was not one the Minister advertised much - one should not just do courses but have a general knowledge of the subject of economics, and the scientists in my college were annoyed at that and, certainly, those of us in the social sciences area were annoyed.

The problem is that many people who have never given a lecture think it is a bit of cinch of a job and that they could undoubtedly do it better and know far more about it and keep on making rules. That demoralises the people who do the work. Part of the feed-through on it is that in the promotions system there is 40% for giving the lecture, 40% for research and 20% for other factors. Lecturing, which has been devalued as a skill, along with what students learn from each other, is the core of the university. This is a plea from somebody in the front line. Please have no more quangos and no more committees. The world was performing just as well and was far simpler when I had people in charge such as Professor Louden Ryan, as my first head of department, and Basil Chubb, sometimes known as the dean. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy is being inserted on top of what is a simple task. I agree that if people are not giving good lectures, a mechanism has to be found to deal with that. I am not sure we have yet done that. When we get satisfaction ratings from students from mainland Europe, North America and from the external examiners, I ask why people who do not give lectures are assumed frequently to know much more about the issue than those who do. It is corrosive of morale and a waste of money within a university system which is always saying how cash-strapped it is to run these quangos.

Senator John Crown will be my seconder. We have in his field an outstanding international reputation.

What is the QQAAI supposed to do? There are also fields where we meet the highest international standards, which may not be suitable for bureaucratic scrutiny. Much of what went wrong in economics required not State quangos or work studies but subversive people to say that this kind of theory is damaging to society as a whole. We must protect the autonomy of universities and of individual lecturers and not have a curriculum approach, which brought eastern European universities to disarray. They disappeared when the Berlin wall fell because they were there to teach orthodox wisdom and not have the constant disputes and debates that are the nature of higher education. I ask the Minister to consider why there is a necessity to have the Higher Education Authority and the Qualifications and Quality Assurance Authority involved. What problem is this meant to address?