Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat or, as they say in Hungary, köszönöm.

I want to echo what Senator Higgins said. The national strategy for higher education, the last iteration of the aims and goals of the higher education sector in Ireland, sets out that our universities should be the engines of economic recovery. It was written after the intellectual and ethical failures of the so-called Celtic tiger, the crash and the austerity that brought us to where we are now. It is really important that we set out in the Bill these commitments to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Sustainable Development Goals and so on because it is vitally important that our universities are not only engines of economic recovery, entrepreneurship, innovation and all those good things, but that they are also the engines of our ethical and social recovery because we do not have to walk too far from this building to find people in doorways and parks. The front page of a national newspaper today has a photograph of a family in a tent. This is symptomatic of the ethical and social failures in Ireland. That is what a university is for: it is for speaking truth to power. A university should not be the seamless extension of the establishment with its chief executive putting forward Government economic policy. It is set out in the mission statements of Technological University Dublin and Trinity College Dublin that we must have a provocative professoriate who challenge the hegemony and the Gleichschaltung of the day which encourages things such as data centres and shiny tech industry but which does not give people a roof over their head or a place to live. All these young people from Trinity cannot hold the modest aspiration to have a home and a secure place to live in which they can make the vital life decisions that will determine the future of this republic in the next 100 years. I echo what Senator Higgins said for all those reasons. We have an opportunity to get in at the building blocks of this aspirations piece of legislation so let us get it right.