The Labour Party broadly welcome this Bill but there are a number of points which would enhance the legislation. I am very glad that the Minister of State began by paying tribute to An Bord Scoláireachtaí Comhalairte who have over the years provided assistance to people to travel to the United States, both for short and long visits. I was very interested in their work. I visited the United States as a post graduate student in the sixties and again in the seventies when I went back to the mid-west as a teacher. Only two years ago I visited Berkeley University among others as a visiting scholar. I have to say that the exchanges facilitated by the board have proved to be of enormous benefit.
It is interesting to reflect on the changes which have taken place between my visits in the sixties and more recent visits in the eighties. The people who benefited in the sixties were very often underfunded at home. It was only, for example, in the second half of the sixties that people began to talk about science, but bureaucratic opinion in this country refused adamantly to regard psychological, social or legal sciences as sciences at all. The crude definition in the academic world was that anything for which you wore a white coat during the day was a science and anything for which you did not wear a white coat was not a science at all. The National Science Council held their obdurate opinion about this rather limited view of the sciences and were replaced by other bodies, which had the practical effect in the seventies that an honours student with first or second honours grade I in any one of the sciences could proceed automatically to post-graduate work, whereas an honours student in one of the psychological or social sciences or economic sciences had no grant funding or aid whatsoever.
This indication of the limited thinking in the academic world and the paucity of philosophical training which did not understand the debate between the physical and human sciences and any of the philosophical assumptions involved, unfortunately was rampant throughout the Department of Education and occasionally, by extension, the Department of Foreign Affairs. In this atmosphere of the sixties, the first grants become available, usually through fellowships, straightforward grants or teaching assistantships in the US universities. People found the procedure cumbersome.
If I have a criticism about the operations of An Bord Scoláireachtaí Comhalairte it is that at times their requirements were often difficult to fulfil. You had to apply early in the year for qualification late in the autumn. This had further conditions attached to it. You had to have been accepted in an American university to benefit, and to meet this condition you would, of course, have to assure the people towards whom you were directed that you would arrive and you would have to do this without knowing whether you would have your ticket.
Many of us are survivors of those times of under-funding in Irish education which it is to be hoped will gradually dribble to an end over time until education will be properly funded, but I recall those times very well. The distinguished contributors now to the social and economic sciences — one of the luminaries being Professor Damien Hannon of the ESRI — went at that time to the mid-west of the US and the grants given by the board were of immense assistance.
At this stage let me reflect on one of the strengths of the board, the qualifications of the people who made the decisions. They were made with an assurance of academic independence and integrity and I had never any doubt that the people who went were of the first order. They not only benefited but as the Minister said correctly, made valuable contributions later. I wish the Minister had said a little more about the qualifications of the people who will sit on the new board. I would like some assurance in this regard. However, I always thought this is effectively an educational matter, a rather rare outcome in the Department of Foreign Affairs. There is some confusion even today about whether this is an educational matter or a matter for the Department of Foreign Affairs. Anyhow, it is introduced by the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs. However, we need an assurance about the qualifications now suggested. There is quite a difference between a board of academics, for example, as I understand prevailed in the days of An Bord Scoláireachtaí Comhalairte and a board composed jointly of ministerial nominations on the one hand and by representatives of the embassy on the other. I would like assurances on the academic content of the ministerial component — which I might readily receive — but also about the appointees from the embassy.
There are those of us who went to the US. I did not avail of this scheme because I was always acting in a slightly different realm and often had to move more quickly. However, I knew all the people involved and I think it would be very useful that we be given absolute assurances that academic criteria alone will govern the issue of awards. We need that on all sides of the House.
There is no explicit commitment to additional funding in this Bill. There is a suggestion — more than that, a statement — that the funding will increase, but there is no clear commitment to the provision of any definite sum of money.
I want assurances on one very important point. The scheme as outlined in the explanatory memorandum and in the Bill itself seems inadequate when it deals with the position of artists. The explanatory memorandum refers to "other related educational and cultural programmes and activities". That requires elaboration and perhaps slight amendment. Because of the exchanges that took place in the eighties, and which will prevail in the nineties, there will be a number of individual artists who will not be part of a general cultural programme. I am talking about individual painters, sculptors, actors, writers, poets, performers and so forth. I need an absolute assurance that none of these forms of the arts is excluded by the wording at 2 (ii) (c) in the explanatory memorandum. Because of the nature of the work of many of these artists, and their contributions, they are not caught in a programme. A cultural programme is something that consists of exchanges. It is built up over time. It may have many different components. It may move from one phase to another, but the kind of people going in both directions very often are operating for short terms within the confines of their own work, perhaps invited by a major institution if going from Ireland to the US, or invited here by a significant group who are interested in the arts. That should be looked at.
I should say a word about the construction of this scheme that has grown out of the fifties. Certainly in the sixties the people who took advantage of the availability of funds to travel to or to stay for periods in the US if going from Ireland were much geared towards technical and applied instruction and they were, so to speak, in the first decade of the postclerical period in Irish social science. They found we went from a clerically dominated social science to a kind of crude empiricism and those of us who were then young had our first exposure to computers, statistical applications and large scale surveys in the US. There we joined many of the other people who had come from different parts of the world, the Latin world and the African world. Then, about the end of the sixties, we were all over our empirical positivistic excess and had moved on to broader and more theoretical concerns. In the seventies, the kind of people going were wider in terms of their orientation in drawing on what had happened in the European academic world and all over the world. In the eighties, the people who came from the other side, from the US, have made distinguished contributions and have moved from specialisms to broader concerns.
This is a very valuable point. For example, in that earlier period some of our very finest people now in the Department of Agriculture studied seed research and animal husbandry in Illinois and places like that and are now all over the place. It is very important that the new board acknowledge that the world of intellectual concern is now much more multidisciplinary rather than specialist. It has also drawn on several different traditions. UCG has received many Fulbright scholars in subjects ranging from law to history, including political science, sociology and so forth. It has always found them very valuable. The fundamental point is that the definition of qualification for receipt of funding must be broad and it also must be flexible. When seeking to match a scholar in a university departments in Ireland with a university in the United States, the titles of the departments will be quite different. A student may come from a department of government in the United States to a department of law in Ireland. The operation must be flexible in every way.
Educational exchanges would be extraordinarily narrow if they were in any sense confined to third level exchanges. Some of the very best value is to be gained from exchanging teachers at primary and secondary levels. If we want to exchange the benefits and the down side of our educational systems — and there are many defects in both our systems — to try to draw from the ethos beneficially and see the negative side, it is useful to look at the totality of the educational system by exchanges at primary and secondary level as well as at third level. Why do people go to the United States in many cases? In the sixties, seventies and eighties one of the main reasons was the very large libraries. Irish libraries were totally under-funded. Unfortunately, because of university budgeting cuts, many Irish universities are cutting back on their contributions to journals. It is no longer possible to keep a complete series of the major journals in any scientific field. The cost of a journal in biochemistry could run to a subscription of perhaps £2,000 or £3,000 per annum. Irish scholars went to America because of the quality of teaching, the capacity for research and the good libraries which were available, with quick and easy access to what was being published in one's field. One could also publish very easily. It is very important that we should not use capacities like this, which are very small, as an excuse for the under-funding of any of our research institutions or third level institutions.
It is at the post-graduate level that the Americans come into their own. They have some physical advantages there. At under-graduate level I have found that the performance of the Irish student is higher on average, at least in my subject. An interface of exchanges which will benefit us both is valuable if it covers the full educational spectrum. It should not cover just the full pedagogic programme but should include the research programme and should go beyond that to include cultural matters. It should not be limited in cultural matters to people who are part of the programme but should include individual artists. That would be a fair summary of my definition of its scope.
It is a limitation to have too strict an institution-to-institution contract forming the basis of the exchange. If one academic institution exhausts its quota it may have to choose between a legal scholar and an agricultural scientist or a poet. It might have used them up for those few years. If it is limited to institution-to-institution relationships we are narrowing it. It may be that a community group altogether separate from an academic institution may want to invite an American writer in residence. Recently a number of them have come for a year to compose music or to write epic poems at the heart of Irish rural communities. It may be that there is not an institution and a department within it which has made the necessary application for such an exchange and the community in the hinterland would lose that opportunity. That is what I mean by flexibility. We must get away from the narrow confines of matched institution-to-institution exchanges.
There is also need for flexibility in relation to time. The idea that one could not make an exchange within so many years of a previous exchange is important. In the sixties and seventies the dominating thinking behind the generosity was that the relationship was one between a developed country which had become urban, industrial and technologically sophisticated and an undeveloped country which was agricultural and rural. Many of the people who went to America went to MIT, for example. The world of the 120 who are the other side of the Fulbright relationship has qualitatively changed. There is no longer a hegemonic economic model towards which all these 120 countries are aiming. There is no longer any kind of hegemonic moral system. The relationship has become at the level of intellect and at the level of work, research and arts more a negotiated relationship of equals, in which people clearly benefit from moving within a wider cultural pool where one hopes that the aspiration is that every country in the world should have the right to tell its own story, when women can participate as well as men and when cultures are regarded as having components which are equal, when religious systems are seen as various paths to truth which have emerged in the history of ideas and of feeling. That is a warm and generous kind of world, even if it is idealistic in many ways, and one towards which we would aspire. That world is very different from a world of utilitarianism. I would hope that that kind of philosophical thrust and understanding and the experience of being in another culture is a valuable thing, maybe even more valuable than the narrow utilitarian focus of the late fifties or early sixties. I hope that will prevail in the thinking of the new board.
We must eliminate as much bureaucracy as we can. It would be very valuable if we were energetic about this, in terms of not leaving it to the individual student to apply. What has happened in practice is that university teachers — I have been one for a long time — have had a certain amount of contact with different departments abroad. When their own students are coming up they introduce them on. One puts oneself in the position of the student coming up to graduate and one has to write all these letters to different institutions elsewhere. One can put oneself in the position of the person receiving all these letters and adjudicating or the person allocated to make awards. It would be very much better to create a relationship with departments and institutions in which there would be an easier way of organising matters so that people would not be so uncertain as to what was happening.
I am happy that thousands of United States students are coming to Ireland, not only for short courses in the summer but participating for entire semesters within our universities and colleges. There are more academics coming. They all realise what a very singularly stupid and offensive suggestion it is to say that those of us, such as myself, who have been morally prepared, and politically felt it necessary, to oppose aspects of the United States foreign policy in one regime or another, are in some way, in the crude ignorant remark, "anti-American". Many of us have been at the heart of America and many of us know and respect the warmth and generosity of the average citizen of the United States who is as appalled as we are when militarism or some kind of hegemonic purpose is used as a substitute for a humanistic foreign policy.
I have made some suggestions with which the Minister may deal in his Second Stage reply.
