John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am strongly supportive of Senator Barrett's Bill. The presence of people like Senator Barrett in these Houses should be a lesson to us all. It says something about the way politics in general esteems expertise and the way our society esteems expertise that there have been so few people with his qualifications in positions of political authority in a country that has been undone by a lack of economic expertise. When one looks at where we place academic achievement, original research and intellectual expertise in the firmament of importance, on the night of the bank guarantee there was not one PhD economist working in a front-line capacity in the Department of Finance. All of these decisions were being taken by people who did not have that level of doctoral expertise on the Government side or on the side of officialdom. I am not sure what expertise the bankers brought in that night. There was a colossal lacuna of available expertise.

Another area of generally regarded dysfunction is the health service. One of the key problems in our health service is the lack of academic leadership. Our service has been intensely managed and underled. Our health service has more medical schools per head of population than any other country in the Western world yet, paradoxically, fewer doctors. I do not know how we manage to achieve that unique constellation of attributes. We have fewer doctors in career level posts and our six medical schools between them have fewer than 100 consultant-level clinician researcher academics in the full-time employ of the universities. I believe the figure is 60 between six schools, while Harvard Medical School has 1,500 such people. There is clearly something wrong with the way we structure academia in this country.

I hope the Bill proposed by Senator Barrett, in spirit and in the letter of what it sets out to achieve, will be largely accepted and will lead to a fundamental reform of how we do this particular bit of national business. I hope it will create a regulatory environment that will enable policymakers to be assured of academic independence, freedom, financial accountability and financial probity. In the structural changes it makes to the HEA and the institution of the new higher education research grants committee, it will give us the appropriate division of responsibility. There is always a tendency in small countries to try to bring multiple areas of responsibility, where conflicts of interest exist, into one unitary structure. Senator Barrett has bravely and correctly attempted to remedy this by identifying the need for separate structures to look after academic oversight, academic leadership and the more hard-edged business of financial accountability.

It will, because it separates these two functions, give us a focus on the economic appraisal of expenditure by the sector. I am the first to admit that, left alone, academics can be well capable of drifting off into the ether and the clouds of impracticality when deciding how to spend other people's money. It is a good idea that there will be twin demands of academic rigour and financial accountability.

I hope it will also deal with the terrible problem alluded to by Senator Barrett of an extraordinary imbalance in the way we grant lifelong, unshakeable tenure to people who work in so many areas of the public sector, who cannot be fired except at the point of a court case, and give such absolute thin ice conditions of employment to highly qualified people who work in academia. I deal with large numbers of full-time public servants on the administrative side who have lifelong jobs and great job security. Most of them do a very honest day's work and try to do their work. I also deal with unbelievably brilliant, accomplished, mainly young people - often women - who have PhDs and several years of postdoctoral experience. They are living from one six-month period to the next, wondering when they will get another research grant or whether, at the whim of people whose vanity research project is satisfied by their activities, they have a job to go to.

One cannot build a proper university and academic research centre unless these underpinnings are correct. I hope, with the new division of labour and responsibilities proposed by Senator Barrett, one group will be focused on academic excellence as a main job. As a result we will see the natural development of the kind of structures that exist everywhere else in the world.

It cannot have escaped attention - I do not say this with disrespect towards any institutions - that the institutions which have achieved top 100 status in international university rankings have dropped. Moreover, the only university in the top 50 dropped out. This should tell us something. An extraordinary product comes from our universities in well-educated, smart young people who do extraordinarily well competitively. Having returned to the sector for the past 21 years, and having worked in the sector in two other jurisdictions before I came home, one sometimes wonders if this is despite, rather than because of, the institutions we have set up. There are few faculties and research is poorly funded but the one extraordinary human asset is the very bright young people who are motivated and determined to get out on the other side. This often adds a bit of smokescreen to the deficiencies of the third level sector.

We must get this right. There has not been a serious attempt to reform the sector for a long time and Senator Barrett deserves much credit for trying to do so. I hope most of this Bill will ultimately be accepted by the Government and it can be seen as the beginning of a new process of renewal for third level education and research in this country.