David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment’s annual budget is just short of €900 million. IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland firms employ some 475,000 people. The agencies do not appoint people to the boards of the enterprises they finance. The reward to Irish society is the employment they create, rather than seats on these companies' boards. Should the reward to Irish society from successful universities, such as TCD and others, be the graduates they produce rather than a handful of seats on governing bodies?

On the international stage, Irish degrees and qualifications are eagerly sought after. Irish graduates are welcome entrants to the great graduate schools of the world as they pursue postgraduate qualifications of the highest rank. Irish third-level education is decentralised, diverse and serves its students and society well. It is flexible, student-centred, international and, heretofore, reasonably bureaucrat-free. This Bill is bureaucratically intense and based on quangos. It sits uneasily in this parliamentary democracy. It proposes to reduce the number of people democratically elected to the governing bodies of universities and asks our democratic Parliament to support reducing the role of the ballot box. Elected academics, elected non-academic staff and elected students are to be reduced in numbers, to be replaced by others whose route to the governing bodies is not specified by this legislation. Why should the Oireachtas agree to this?

The Bill seeks to amend charters and letters patent which predate the foundation of the State. The Ceann Comhairle's request that these documents be lodged in the Oireachtas Library to be consulted by Members was rejected by the Minister. Why? The Minister is looking puzzled, so perhaps there is an explanation. Perhaps he does not know, or perhaps there is somebody lower down the chain who refused to put those documents in the library. It would be interesting if the Minister were to be able to get an answer to this for me.

Respect for the Chair is a bulwark of our democracy. There is a total disparity between the position of the Minister, who has advised that charters and letters patent can be readily emended, and those who believe that charters and letters patent are binding on both parties in perpetuity. The latter viewpoint was strongly expressed in the US Supreme Court judgment in the Dartmouth College case in 1819, which overturned state intervention in the governance of that college. Members should have been allowed to peruse these documents.

My amendment seeks to delete these lines on pages 11 and 12 of the Bill: "This Act, other than sections 85, 86,87,95,97,98,99,100,101,102,103 and 105, shall come into operation on such day or days as the Minister may by order or orders appoint either generally or with reference to any particular purpose or provision and different days may be so appointed for different purposes or different provisions".