Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would like to go back 20 years to the early to mid-1990s when a competition was run and sponsored by Eircom to establish an urban town as an information capital of Europe. Ennis in County Clare beat off stiff competition from about six or seven other towns to win that competition and it became an IT capital, certainly of Ireland. The intention was that an IT hub would develop in the town of Ennis and its environs. That cost the people of Ennis quite a lot of money in that businesses spent up to £100,000 campaigning and preparing for that.

The upshot was that every home in Ennis received a computer but that was not all. Job creation was promised, as was a third level institution specialising in computers and IT, but the latter never happened in spite of numerous political commitments and promises that Ennis would be considered as a location for an institute of technology. I do not have much hope that it will happen in the future.

What happened was that Limerick Institute of Technology set up a pilot campus, or a sub-campus, in Ennis in the old museum. It offered a higher certificate in business computing - level 6. I would not be very familiar with the specifics of that but what I am familiar with is that students attended first and second year of that degree course in Ennis and then transferred to Limerick for third and fourth year. That resulted in access to education for a cohort of people who would not otherwise have had access to education, in particular mature students, possibly housewives and house husbands, in the economic climate that existed, where people found themselves being made redundant or unemployed and who may not have had access to a car and the financial support to travel to Limerick to do a course. The numbers were small and it conditioned the students so that when they moved into year three and to a larger campus, they were well-conditioned and well-prepared to successfully complete the course.

The facts speak for themselves in that a number of students who went through the Ennis campus became students of the year and received first class honours degrees. In the Minister of State's county, there is a similar campus. The numbers there are a much smaller and it has not had the same success, possibly through no fault of its own, but that campus will remain open.

What disturbs me about this is that it has been closed and the course has been withdrawn with unilateral effect. Those currently in second year will be able to complete that year, but those in first year will not be able to complete their second year. They will have to move into Limerick to do their second, third and fourth years, which they did not budget or account for.

Even more disturbing is the fact that we are seeing yet again the centralisation of education. No respect or due diligence is being paid to providing accessible, higher education in towns like Ennis. It would not break the bank if Limerick Institute of Technology were to leave in place this course, which has proven to be successful. It seems irrational and illogical that anyone could make a budgetary case for getting rid of the course. In fact, they should not only retain the course but should also be offering more courses in Ennis.

Institutes of technology have a responsibility to provide facilities and educational opportunities in smaller towns such as Ennis, Tipperary Town, Nenagh and Clonmel. That is part of their remit. They were given enormous development resources by the EU on the understanding that they had a regional remit. They started off as being regional technology colleges and then became institutes of technology, but they seem to have forgotten their responsibility to be regional as well as providing a holistic education, access to which is evenly spread to towns within their nucleus.

I hope the Minister of State will have something positive to say about this. It seems nonsensical to close down this successful course.