To put the hypocrisy of the Minister before the House, I should like to quote from Volume 278, column 95, from a debate which we had on third-level education. The Minister said unctuously:
The National Coalition Government hold it as a priority that power must be vested in the people and that they must have a voice in the formulation of policy in relation to their needs.
If the Minister stood by the Treaty Stone in Limerick and emitted those words at present I wonder how many gardaí it would take to protect him from the wrath of the people of Limerick, because they are fed up with that kind of talk, not backed up by action. There is hardly anybody in Limerick satisfied with the Minister's arrangement, with the imposition that the Minister placed upon the National University of Ireland to bring in statute 178 to enable the university to confer degrees which should be conferred by the National Council for Educational Awards.
We have had this discussion on and off since December, 1974. We have had statements from the Ministers for Education, Industry and Commerce and Foreign Affairs, all showing why the National University of Ireland should confer the degrees in the National Institute for Higher Education. It is difficult to summarise what those Ministers argued, but I could possibly summarise by saying that both the Minister for Education and the Minister for Industry and Commerce made a great virtue of a unified system; that they were abolishing a binary system, that they were anti-binary and pro-unified system at third level. They talked a lot about traditional institutions and new institutions and how they were going to unify them. We contend that their proposals are not doing anything of the kind. We are contending that what they are doing at the final stage in the institute in Limerick is bringing in a university degree unsuited to the type of education being provided there, putting it as a cap on the system that obtains there. We heard that this system was to enable student mobility. Student mobility all right but not the kind of mobility I thought the Minister was talking about where there could be transfers from university colleges to Limerick and vice versa. The mobility is the mobility of the students protesting against the mess which the Minister has made of their college and of their qualifications.
How can any Minister contend that what has been done is a breaking down of the traditional isolation of the technological sector from the old university sector? There is no such process even in train in what the Minister has done up to now. The Minister for Industry and Commerce said that we on this side of the House were basing our policy on a purely binary system which obtains in Britain, that he was sorry to see this, that we were looking at a society and an economic structure that is on the point of collapse, and that we should look elsewhere for our models. Of course the model was the model which he himself and the Cabinet sub-committee thought up.
I have looked elsewhere, and I would like to tell the House what I saw when I looked elsewhere. The Minister made his case very strongly about a sick and ailing Britain and indicated that this was because Britain had a certain type of third-level education, and if it had the one that Deputy Keating, Minister for Industry and Commerce, advocated this would not happen. I would like to take the Minister for Education and the Minister for Industry and Commerce on a short Cooks tour of higher education, and I think I will show them that in many countries the universities are not involved in the awarding of degrees in many important branches of the technological sector in education.
We will start with the Soviet Union. There are 44 universities in the Soviet Union out of 794 higher education establishments. The universities are involved with only 10 per cent of higher education enrolments. The 750 non-university institutes train specialised executives for the economy in technology. There are 227 such institutes of which six are V.T.U.Z. factories or factories with higher technical institutes attached to them. There are 105 institutes of agriculture, in which the universities play no part. There are 99 called medicine institutions; they are mainly for the training of medical personnel, but 172 are involved in physical education. There are 217 institutes of education that have nothing to do with the universities. There are 47 fine arts institutes. The average strength of these institutes we are talking of—and I want to underline the message that they are non-university—is that of about 5,000 students, about half of them are full-time students. Obviously having a university and a non-university sector in the Soviet Union is not a source of economic weakness there, as the Minister for Industry and Commerce would have us believe is the case in Britain.
We will take Japan, no slouches in the technological world either. There are universities and non-universities in Japan also, higher technical establishments known as—as I am sure Deputy O'Malley could tell me, having visited Japan, and consequently must be an expert—Tankidaiguku and other technical colleges as well. There are also specialised non-university establishments for the training of particular professions such as health officers, dieticians, nurses and so on. There are 307 universities with a wide range of faculties, and then the Tankidaiguku are for courses in technology, domestic economy, education, literature and so forth. Will the Minister for Industry and Commerce or his satellite in this matter, the Minister for Education claim that the technology of Japan suffers by not having the universities validate all final third-level education? Every transistor, every Yamaha, every Toyota all over the world, will disprove him if that is his contention.
The Minister for Industry and Commerce also made a great to-do about Sweden, and admittedly a very high percentage—I think it must be as high as over 90 per cent—of the third level is placed in the universities in Sweden. But even in Sweden there is a signficant non-university higher education section, dealing with agriculture—I think we had visits by the Department of Education to Sweden on a considerable basis over the years—also providing paramedical education, education for journalists at third non-university level, education for teachers, for the army, for customs officers, air traffic officers and so on.
What about the six original EEC members and the non-university higher education in those states? Certain Ministers seemed to be saying: "Here is this poor old crumbling Britain to the east of us tottering to an early grave because of the mistakes it has made"—not having the wisdom of the Minister for Industry and Commerce to guide it of course and because of what he called the system that the Fianna Fáil Party had advocated. But I am afraid that more or less—and I use those words deliberately—the same kinds of option are found in many other countries. In Germany, Belgium, France, The Netherlands, a whole range of higher establishments in which the university is not involved at all have been created, some of them even quite recently.
Take Germany, for example, and particularly non-graduate engineers attending about 150 ingenieuraka-demien. The final examination confers the title of engineer. An interesting point about this and one that is relevant to all this talk we had about mobility in this country is that those who do the non-graduate engineering course and perform well in their finals —they are entitled to be called engineers when they qualify—may enter the tecnische hochschule which trains the professional graduate engineers. There is mobility there even though there are two separate sectors. There is a university sector and a non-university sector. In this system as well there is a possibility of getting the equivalent of a leaving certificate, the abitur, other than in the normal way, and there is an element there of a second chance education. This is an area where the system that the Minister or all the Ministers are trying to impose on us does not obtain. Before I leave Germany, I do not need to emphasise —and the Minister for Industry and Commerce informed me of this the last time I was speaking here—that Germany is well-known for its competence in technology and general engineering.
What about the non-university higher technical education in Belgium? There are 230 establishments providing for as many as 40,000 students. They study for engineering technician diplomas, diplomas in agriculture, chemicals, diplomas in radio and electronics, construction, business and accountancy, all in the field we are thinking about. They get diplomas as interpreters and translators, merchant navy and pilot certificates and diplomas in specialised education. I would like to call the Minister's attention to that as well because we do need a diploma in specialised education. In a written reply to me some time ago he told me that he was not giving out certificates or diplomas to people doing diplomas in specialised education in this country. Some of the courses that I have been mentioning in the case of Belgium are four-year courses corresponding in time exactly to the period covered by a student in the Institute in Limerick.
Take France, where there is a little trouble at the moment, as the House is aware, because some of the students think that they are going to be directed into certain educational channels, not for their own good or their own development but for the development of the people who will employ them. I am not going to deal with that because it is not relevant to what we are discussing here, but I want to mention the non-university scene in France.
Non-university higher education of a very high level—of course there are technical difficulties about definition here—is provided in technology, in agriculture and in commerce. Notable are the three National Institutes of Applied Science in Lyons, Rennes and Toulouse. The Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and a whole lot of those ècoles under the various Ministers are all non-university. They do not damage the economy of France by not being under the umbrella of the university. There are over 30 private engineering schools whose diplomas are recognised by the French Government and by the State. There are non-university schools of agriculture and veterinary surgery. The Minister for Industry and Commerce might be glad to hear about that. I am sure the cattle in France, those lovely Charolais we import, do not suffer anything by the fact that the veterinary surgery faculty is not under the university umbrella or the degree is not conferred by a university. Higher schools of commerce and private dental schools are also involved in this third-level, non-university, higher education. Up to 70,000 students get their education in such establishments.
The Netherlands have non-university education covering higher secondary, technical and commercial subjects, including schools of seamanship and textiles. There are schools of agriculture and domestic science schools including schools for the training of dieticians, business schools and hotel industry schools, and schools for social education. Incidentally, I am wondering about the degree in hotel management that was sanctioned for the RTC in Galway some time ago. Is it the Minister's intention to confer a degree of bachelor of technology on a person trained to run a hotel, or is it the other one, bachelor of commercial studies?
I adduce these examples because there was an attempt to brainwash this House and the country into thinking that if the National Council for Educational Awards were to confer the terminal degrees in the National Institute for Higher Education that would be in some way perpetuating a system which is wrong. They would in some way be damaging the economy of the country.
The Minister for Education himself in a debate here on this question stated that it was false to pretend that he was not behind the Government's proposals and decisions with regard to third-level education, that he was fully behind them. It was thought before that that the proposals that came from his Department were turned down by the sub-committee of the Cabinet and finally by the full Cabinet and that the Minister for Education was a reluctant proposer of the policy to the House and to the country. However, he is on record as saying that he was behind the Government policy, that he was defending it, that he thought it was the right thing. As this policy demands that the university should confer these degrees, and leave an area of study without any degree, and indeed leave it without any degree in the National Institute for Higher Education, the Minister must stand accused of being completely insensitive to the institute in Limerick.
The Minister for the Gaeltacht must be trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, stating that he wants for Limerick what the students and what the staff of the institute want.