Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister knows about the marketers' advice on what was supposed to be wrong with the image logo of Trinity College Dublin's on the shield. It was a complete and utter waste of money and I was trying to stop the Department being seduced by this nonsense. Can we get good doctors out of it? I do not care who is engaged in the marketing, except that the cost should be set at about the level of average pay in a university, not the multiples the people in question receive. The adoption of capitalist terms in universities, within a few years of the capitalist system collapsing and having to be rescued, is bizarre. I do not know what books on the economy my university colleagues read when they put forward this nonsense. Mr. Brendan Kennelly's poetry did not deteriorate after 2008, but marketing, banking - perhaps due to too much banqueting - accountancy and management did. That this failed lingo is being introduced into eminent universities is very sad. That is the reason I am trying to take out the section. I may try to persuade the Minister in a different forum that it is about time the universities got back into the classroom, paid some attention to students, as she said in the interview, and stop parading around in marketing. It is part of the great nonsense of a collapsed business system from which her Limerick colleague, the Minister for the Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, tried to rescue us. However, I have been rather self-indulgent on the issue. I wish they had nothing to do with universities.

Amendments Nos. 2 and 3 proposed definitions that I attempted to insert. Amendment No. 6 was about marketing. I have had my say and thank the Minister for her patience. Amendment No. 7 is about the person. Leaving in the word "person" is dangerous, as somebody can say, "I, Joe Bloggs, am a person and I have set up an international institution called "Trinity Economics University." I do not want such persons around. I, therefore, ask the Minister's advisers to look at the issue. I had never heard of it previously. I do not think we call CIE or the Department of Finance a person. I do not know why for this purpose a university is defined as a person, particularly when there are charlatans about and we are trying to defend the reputation of Irish universities.