Yesterday evening, I had just been saying on this Bill that this was not the first report of a Board of Visitors in connection with the National University of Ireland. There was a report last year of a visitation sent to inquire into a point raised by Professor Henchy in the National University itself with regard to a Faculty of Law. That visitation has reported and from the point of view of form and content and approach, I was about to compare these two reports. The two reports I shall call by the name of the chairman in each case.
The report which we are considering now, which I call the Murnaghan Report, does not contain a copy of the Petition which it was considering. It does contain a sentence from Mr. Kenny's Petition but although it does give a number of other quotations, does not give his statement before the Visitors that if the titles were changed, that is, if the words "College Lecturer" were dropped, he would be content. The Report signed by Mr. Justice Ó Dálaigh gives the Petition with which it was dealing in extenso.
There is no acknowledgment in the present Report of a legal case presented in writing to the Visitors on behalf of the College but a number of findings are given which are not supported by any legal argument. The Ó Dálaigh Report contains 13 pages of an appendix which I have before me, 13 pages of closely reasoned arguments on the law, which is headed, "Reasons for the Board's Opinions".
The Report which we are considering here does not give at any point any legal reason for the decisions arrived at.
There are other contrasts between the procedure of the two visitations and between the two Reports. The Ó Dálaigh Report notes that an informal meeting was held with the University authorities before formal proceedings could be begun. That was in accordance with all precedent, the precedent, as I have said before, that these visitations come from the person who granted the Charter and are generally of a friendly character. The Visitors to University College, Dublin, were asked by the authorities of the College to discuss informally the method and scope of the inquiry at a preliminary hearing. They refused to do that.
Having so refused, they circularised certain members of the staff, all the College Lecturers and Assistant College Lecturers, inviting submissions from them. They wrote also to the National University of Ireland, to University College, Cork, University College, Galway and to Saint Patrick's College, Maynooth. None of these bodies shared the view of the Visitors that the visitation to University College, Dublin, was any concern of theirs. Perhaps I could be allowed to say. Sir, that the Visitors threw their nets very wide but that the catch was small. University College, Cork and University College, Galway made no submissions. No College Lecturer and no Assistant Lecturer came forward to make any submission or give any evidence and the Senate of the University replied, as is made clear in the Report and made a little bit unclear as well in page 9 of the Report, by sending a copy of a Resolution passed by the Senate which refused to concede that there had been any irregularities at University College, Dublin.
One professor and one University lecturer made submissions in favour of the Petition but did not appear before the Visitors to give any oral evidence. The only persons who appeared in favour of the Petition were the Petitioner himself, Mr. Kenny, and Professor Henchy, who had made the Petition in connection with the National University of Ireland and who, during the course of the recent hearings, raised a further legal point with regard to University College, Dublin, and raised this point to the National University.
That illustrates the point I was making about the application of a legal magnifying glass to our Charters. We have had two visitations and the threat of a third. If the lawyers want to examine our Charters very carefully, they presumably can have any number of petitions and have any amount of difficulty raised in deciding what is the precise meaning of particular words in particular enactments.
Let me come now to the specific matter upon which the Visitation were appointed. Mr. John Kenny presented a Petition, the point of which was that the College has no power to bestow the title of College Lecturer upon persons who had been employed as Assistants in the main and who had given long service in that capacity in the College. There can be no doubt that the College has power to appoint Assistants. Assistants, who had given approved service, have been appointed and called College Lecturers which gives them higher salaries, increments and pensions and gives them a title which they prefer.
May I say that the title "Assistant" has, I think, disappeared from most Universities in Britain and the title "Lecturer" has been substituted? The net point in the Petition, therefore, was assumed to be a matter of titles, whether Assistants could be called College Lecturers after years of service. That and no more, was what was referred to the Visitors for determination by them.
The Report of the Visitors on that point, which I shall quote later, is not particularly clear but it is accepted by the Minister and all of us as meaning that the College has not the power to give the title "College Lecturer", to Assistants. The Visitors, however, go far beyond that particular matter of legal interpretation—this is my point about irrelevancy—and set down verdicts against the Governing Body of University College, Dublin—in general they talk about the policy of the Governing Body—and against the President of University College, Dublin, in particular. These verdicts read more like the factual findings of a jury than the reasoned decisions of judges.
Inferentially, the Visitors condemned the Senate of the University and the General Council of County Councils. It is worthy of note that when the 1908 Act was being passed, the local representatives in Cork and Galway were confined to the local bodies, in the one case, in Munster and in the other, in Connaught. The local representatives for the Dublin College Governing Body were selected—the Lord Mayor of Dublin, a representative of the County Council of Dublin and eight representatives of the General Council of County Councils. Perhaps, the people who framed the 1908 Act had an idea that the Dublin College would, as has been proved to be the case, find students from all over the country.
The Senate of the University, as I shall explain later on, also comes in for criticism from the Visitors. The Rev. Dr. O'Rahilly, who for a number of years was in University College, Cork, and President of that College, stated in an article which appeared in the Irish Independent on May 10th that the Report contains irrelevancies, inaccuracies and insinuations. These, it seems to me, are mild and charitable words in which to describe this document.
The Petitioner, in the course of his evidence, said that if the titles were changed, he would be content but the Visitors were not content. There are many quotations in the Report but this particular quotation from Mr. Kenny does not appear and is not quoted. The Visitors travelled far beyond the question of titles and they insinuated in the Report, in the last paragraph, that a change had been made in the method of appointment which could lend itself to patronage. The Report is explicitly confined by the Visitors to the past 10 years. Therefore, one must assume that that word "patronage" was used to imply that there was a change in the method of appointment and that the present President and the Governing Body are guilty of patronage.
The system of making appointments has not been changed. Mr. John Kenny, the Petitioner in this case, was appointed a couple of years ago as an Assistant to the Law Faculty on the nomination of Professor Patrick McGilligan after his name had gone to the Academic Council and the Governing Body. I was appointed in January, 1912, quite a long time ago, on the nomination of a Professor of French and by exactly the same process as that under which Mr. Kenny became an assistant in University College, Dublin, a couple of years ago. The President, it has been alleged, has power to appoint people on the academic staff. That is not so.
In order that there will be no question of being invidious, let me take my own case. If I wanted, as I did want since I became Professor, an Assistant, I would have to find out first whether money would be provided. I wanted an Assistant to deal with Scottish Gaelic. I did not want to appoint a University Lecturer and be saddled for years with somebody whom I had not seen at work. I wanted to get somebody who would come here and work as an assistant, and be promoted, perhaps, later. I established first whether money would be forthcoming. Then, not by advertisement, but by writing to the Professor in Glasgow and the Professor in Edinburgh and to the only person alive, as far as I know, Mr. Calum MacLean, who is a native speaker of Scottish Gaelic and a first-class speaker of Irish and who knew something about our circumstances, we got a man and paid his expenses over here. The Lecturer in Modern Irish and I saw him. He said he would come but, unfortunately, instead of coming to Dublin, he went to Cyprus in the British Army as a conscript. The man we got a couple of years afterwards wrote in September to say that he had got a far bigger salary in Glasgow. Our choice must have been very good. We finally got somebody who is an Irish speaker because he is married to a native Irish speaker. Because of that, he will presumably be anxious to stay in this country. Native speakers of Scotch Gaelic with a University education are very often students for the Presbyterian ministry and naturally do not desire to come here.
That has to go to the Celtic Faculty. The Celtic Faculty contains people who know Irish extremely well and are good judges. It goes to the Academic Council and the Academic Council contains other people who know Irish well. It then goes to the Finance Committee and then to the Governing Body. All that would dispose of the charge of patronage. I think that in the Report of this body, which was not asked to deal with this matter, the introduction of a word charged with a certain amount of emotion and atmosphere like patronage is quite unworthy of three gentlemen of judicial standing.
On page 4, the Board finds—
1. That the College Lecturers and Assistant Lecturers are not Assistants whom the College is empowered to appoint and remove by virtue of the College Charter, Clause III (5).
It therefore appears that College Lecturers are not Assistants. On the other hand, on page 7 of the Report, the Board states that "it is satisfied that the members of the staff involved are in fact Lecturers". To the reader, therefore, it would appear that Lecturers under the provisions of certain documents are not Assistants but that Assistants in truth and in fact are Lecturers. Nowhere in the Report is there any definition of the word "Lecturer". It would be interesting to have such a definition and to a layman it would appear that such a definition is necessary. The Visitors make no suggestion as to how this difficulty of their own creation is to be got over. Perhaps this peculiar situation could be more adequately dealt with in Irish where there are two verbs "to be", one of identity and the other of being or essence. A member of the Staff of University College, Dublin, could say: "Nílim im léachtóir feasta, ach cé déarfadh ná. gur léachtóir mé?"—"I can't be called a Lecturer for the future but who will deny that I am a Lecturer?"
Page 9 of the Report is a further excellent example of the state of mind of the person who drafted this Report. The statement is made on page 9 that the course adopted by University College, Dublin, "might affect not only the University but the other Constituent Colleges." None of these bodies, however, appeared before the Board and, in the words of Rev. Dr. O'Rahilly, the Visitors have "sorrowfully" to admit that the Senate of the University also refused to adopt the Board's interpretation.
On page 9 of the Report we read: "A special meeting of the Senate was held on the 13th February, 1958, to consider the Committee's report. It was agreed by a majority of 15 to 5 (there were 28 members recorded as being present) ‘That the Senate take no further action, not being convinced that there has been irregularity in the proceedings of University College, Dublin.' As far as the Board is aware, the Senate did not obtain the legal opinion suggested by this Committee." The 28 members are put in juxtaposition with the vote so as to convey the impression that 20 people voted but that 28 people were present.
That statement is untrue and the visitors must surely have known it was untrue. It must surely be an example of wilful misrepresentation of the proceedings of the Senate of the National University of Ireland. There is only one way of finding out how many people are present. The minutes are given with the list of people present. As you go in, you sign your name in a book. The writer of this Report must have totted up the names. I accept his tot—he is probably right. Twenty-eight is the number. But he says "there were 28 members recorded as being present." He omits "at the meeting" for the purpose of giving a particular colour to what happened when the vote was taken.