We in the Fine Gael Party recognise the necessity for an authority of the kind envisaged by this Bill, which will act as a sort of buffer between the Department of Education and the institutions of higher education. I will have a fair amount to say at a later stage in this debate about the larger context in which university and higher education generally must be examined. The Minister spoke of education as being a seamless web. I agree with him. I have admired the way in which he has put this point before. I know that he believes in it sincerely himself and I unreservedly share that point of view. Not only is education part of a seamless web in itself, it is also increasingly part of the greater web of the society which contains it, and questions affecting education are increasingly becoming political questions. I do not mean political questions of a party kind but political questions of a more serious kind which every party will have to look at, no matter who is in or out of government.
In the later stages of my speech I will show the House what I mean by this and show the respects in which this Bill, perhaps, falls short of taking account of these larger perspectives. I shall begin by pointing out the respects in which the individual sections are not yet satisfactory. I realise that many of them have been given reasonable treatment in the other House but we will have to look at them again to see if they cannot be improved.
Before I do that I should like to refer to the circumstances in which this Bill came before the House. In his opening speech the Minister said he might give Senators a brief summary of the circumstances which led to the Government's acceptance of the idea of establishing a Higher Education Authority, An tÚdarás um Ard-Oideachas, and of the preparation of this legislation for the establishment of such an authority on a statutory basis. However, he said nothing at all about the events of the year 1967 which were crucial in the history of this legislation.
In that year the then Minister for Education announced virtually overnight a proposed merger of the two university institutions in Dublin and subsequently promised a White Paper on the topic at a meeting at which I was present. The White Paper never appeared. It was as a result of the controversy which developed out of that promise of the then Minister that the present legislation is before us. It appears to be unreal. I am not in any way accusing the Minister of deceiving the House or of trying to short-circuit a discussion on the matter: I know he will not do that.
It is unreal to look at this Bill otherwise than against its historical background of which the most conspicuous milestone in the public mind was the merger announced by the late Deputy O'Malley. It was announced with minimal information at his disposal from his Department as to the educational implications of the merger and announced with no consultations whatever with any of the people concerned, teachers or students. It will be necessary for me to refer repeatedly to the historical origin of the legislation before us of which the most conspicuous feature is this proposal, now very much put on the long finger, to merge the two higher institutions of education in Dublin.
These are a couple of introductory remarks. I shall come back at a later stage to deal in larger perspective with the objects of the Bill and with the capacity of the Bill, as it stands, of attaining these objects. The Minister and his advisers will naturally with to have some idea of the form which our amendments will take so, I shall go rapidly through the Bill and point out the sections that are defective or leave room for doubt or suspicion. The first of these is section 1, the interpretation section, in which an academic member of the authority is described as a member of An tÚdarás who, at the time of his appointment as such member, had an academic post.
I realise this matter has been well dealt with in the other House but I have to accept that this is a bi-cameral legislature and that we are not bound by anything they do. It must be exasperating to a Minister or to his officials to hear the same arguments being put time and again and I will try not to be repetitious and not to repeat arguments unduly which have already been made in the other House. However, I am not at all happy with the outcome of the decision in the other House with regard to the definition of "academic member".
An academic post should mean something more than this Bill appears to make it mean. It should be possible for somebody to be given an academic post of a purely nominal kind. This could be a nominal academic post involving, perhaps, minimal attendance —even less than is expected of fulltime academic professors or lecturers —and that such a person would qualify for membership of the authority. There are persons with part-time academic posts who would be good members of a higher education authority. I recognise that, but the House ought not to forget that we are legislating for a long time ahead and once a Bill like this has been passed it is not easy to amend it.
It is necessary to recognise that this interpretation section, as it stands, is open to abuse. I can easily conceive that a situation might arise—not necessarily under this Minister or under this Government but under some unthinking Government at a future date—in which it might be desirable, for non-academic or political reasons, and, perhaps, bad political reasons, to appoint to the Higher Education Authority someone who was not really an academic at all and who had very little experience of the academic world. It might be possible to contrive for that person an appointment of a nominally academic kind, thus qualifying him for membership. I shall not reiterate the arguments put up in the other House in regard to that. I know that the Minister's intentions are good and he will regard me as being unduly suspicious, but that is a point with which I propose to deal at length at a later stage.
Further on in the same section, under the definition of "institution of higher education", we are told that the institution is one which the Minister, after consultation with An tÚdarás, designates by regulations as an institution of higher education for the purposes of this Act. Some members of my party expressed the view in the other House that it was worth making it quite clear that the College of Surgeons was an institution of higher education and this should be stated in the Bill so that it should not be left more or less in doubt. The Minister gave an assurance that he would designate the College of Surgeons. My fear is not so much that institutions worthy of inclusion will be left out but that institutions not worthy of inclusion will be put in, not necessarily by this Minister or by this Government but some time in the future. I think that the debate in the other House proceeded too much on the basis that the present Minister, with whom I have no fault to find as a Minister, would be Minister for Education forever or that his own good intentions would be reproduced in his successors.
I do not think one should legislate in that way. One has to legislate on the basis that the good intentions of the present member of the Government recommending legislation are not necessary to be imputed to his successors and it should be guarded against in legislating against the possibility that the present Minister's successors may not have the same good intentions. When the time comes I propose to put down an amendment dealing with this part of the interpretation section.
The Minister accepted in section 3 an amendment in the other House which entrusted to the authority a further function beyond those in the Bill as he originally produced it—the function of promoting that democratisation of the structure of higher education. I know that my own party supported this amendment and were glad when the Minister accepted it. For myself, I should like to have seen something more said about what exactly was meant by democratisation. Let me say, without disloyalty to my own side, I would not, if I were in the Minister's position, have accepted this amendment quite so readily without building into it some kind of directive to a later Minister or authority as to what exactly was meant by it. I do not think that a school or an institution of learning is necessarily the right place for the application of direct democracy in the sense that one man one vote takes everybody under the roof as being equal. I know that the Minister does not think this and I know that the people on my side who suggested this in the other House do not think it either. I will not put an amendment down about it because it was as a result partly of my party's pressure that it was put in the Bill in the first place, but I should like to have seen something more definite as to what this rather vague word was intended to mean in practice.
In addition to that, and I propose to put down an amendment to this effect, I should like to see the authority given yet another function—if it will not sink beneath the waves of all their various functions—the function of planning the absorption of graduates. It is already a serious problem, as the Minister knows. It is not very long since there was a deputation in Leinster House of Higher Diploma in Education students. I believe the Minister saw them; certainly representatives from my party saw them as well as the Labour Party. They were people who were afraid that their educational expectations would end up in disappointment, that they had been led along a path which would end in frustration for them, that they would not be absorbed as teachers in Ireland once they had qualified, and they wanted the Minister to do something about it.
I recognise that the State is not the automatic employer of everybody in the country. I sometimes feel sympathy for Ministers who are confronted by people who suggest that they ought to guarantee their jobs in some way. I do not say that about this or any other Minister but I think that an authority of this kind would be doing a more useful function than some of the ones already recited if they had the job of planning the absorption of graduates so far as that can be done by an educational authority.
There is a problem here which is one of humanity and justice. I often hear people ask: "What is to be done with all those people getting secondary education and who are going to the universities? Who will be left to do the plumbing and the carpentry?" I think it would be inhuman if, in this country we were to deny to somebody who was able to profit from education, whether it be secondary or university education, the chance to do so simply because we wanted him to be a plumber. If we got to that stage, then what is said about a capitalist society would begin to be true about us—that one section of the population was exploiting the other.
I am not at all suggesting that and I want to make it clear at the outset. At the same time, there is a serious problem that there are people in the country who are going into secondary education in large numbers with the undifferentiated subsidised secondary education and who, four or five years later, will be pounding on the door of the universities. The university that takes them in will find itself saddled with the blame, and already has been saddled by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister with the responsibility for turning out large numbers of graduates in subjects for which there is simply no market.
I do not expect the Higher Education Authority to provide a fixed income for BAs. I think that the authority ought to have some standing, more than they already have or appear to be given by this Bill, to plan or to prepare for the absorption of graduates in various branches of life here. I know that this is easier said than done but I will have more concrete suggestions to make about it at a later stage.
I want to suggest to the Minister now that he might give thought to the possibility of extending the functions of the authority so as to allow them to take into account the serious social and political problem which an excess of unemployable BAs or barely employable BAs will represent in this country in a very short time unless the universities drastically curtail their entry. If they did they will have to bear a great deal of public odium which I do not see many politicians anxious to share.
In section 4 the authority are required to bear constantly in mind the national aims of restoring the Irish language and preserving and developing the national culture and they are told to endeavour to promote the attainment of these aims. This section is copied virtually word for word from the Broadcasting Authority Act, 1960, and it reproduces the obligation which was laid by that Act on Radio Telefís Éireann. Of course, this is a healthy aim. It is one that I know the Minister himself is personally committed to as are some other people in his party and some people on this side of the House. It is not enough simply to enact this section which will only be a nuisance to this authority unless we know how the authority will be enabled to carry out the duty so laid upon them.
It is perfectly clear now that part of the trouble in Radio Telefís Éireann has arisen from the fact that they have been asked to do conflicting things. I do not want to stray from the point of issue. I hope the Leas-Chathaoirleach will allow me to go a few inches from the path of relevance if I say that one of the reasons why Radio Telefís Éireann are in the public eye while a review body are being set up to inquire into their workings is that there is an unresolvable conflict in their situations as between the cultural aims which they are supposed to pursue on the one hand and the sheer economic necessities connected with advertising on the other. Nothing relating to advertising arises in this context but a similar conflict will arise. If the authority will have to bear these national aims constantly in mind they will have to be given the means to be able to pursue them as far as they can.
Let us not make a pretence in the Seanad about this. Everybody knows that in the one college in which Irish has a special status—University College, Galway—the recruitment of staff capable of teaching subjects is a very severe difficulty, let alone in Irish. I do not know if these are matters of public knowledge or not. I hope I am not in breach of confidence—I do not think I am because I am not a member of the Senate of the NUI—but I know that in recent years recommendations have been sent up by the Governing Body of University College, Galway, in desperation to make appointments because they could not get anyone else to take up these appointments. These appointments were turned down by the Senate of the NUI as not being of sufficiently high standard to justify being approved. These were people who were being required only to teach in English. The whole problem of university recruitment is a very serious one. I am quite sure the Minister is conscious of it as it was hammered home quite strongly in the other House by Deputy FitzGerald for us and by Deputy Thornley for the Labour Party. It is a very serious problem indeed to recruit people capable of teaching even in their mother's tongue—I am not talking about what is called the native language of this country, but in the tongue they learned from their mother. It is even harder to recruit people who can teach through Irish.
Probably, I could teach my law classes in UCD through Irish if I put my mind to it but I would not be able to teach as well and it would be futile for me to pretend that I could do so. I might be making a brave national gesture but the people listening to me would not be getting as good a service as I could give them through the language I learned from my parents. I am afraid that is a truth that people here are reluctant to face. Accordingly, I hope the Minister will not close his mind to such amendments that we might put down which are designed to ensure that the operation of this section will not be an albatross hanging around the neck of any institution of higher education.
If it were possible to provide an all-Irish university, staffed with people who, in their own subjects, were of normal university competence and able to communicate their knowledge through Irish, I would be the first to promote and encourage the establishment of such an institution. It may be that in some departments that will be possible. However, we will have to differentiate and recognise the difficulties of this problem. Above all, we will have to realise that it is only part of the general problem of recruiting university staff.
We, in University College, Dublin, have had to look not just to Ireland but to England and further afield for university staff. We like—at least it is my preference—to keep as many Irish staff in the college as we possibly can. I notice in the new university in Coleraine there are hardly any Irishmen at all, Orange or Green. There are hardly any Irishmen teaching in the university in Coleraine because they cannot get them. There are not enough people in this country to provide staff for the necessary faculties for the number of higher institutions of education that we have and we must recognise that problem and the difficulties that arise from it. In recognising that fact we must, fairly and squarely, relate it to the problem in regard to the Irish language.
I hope I will not be accused of making a cheap or political point in saying this. I do not mind leaving the section in the Bill but we must add something to it in such a way as to make it clear that it will not become an ostacle to education generally. It would be a marvellous thing if it were possible to ensure higher education through the medium of Irish—effective education and not just sham education —at third level. It would be a marvellous thing and I would be very happy if we could do so. Until that can be done it is important that this section should not be used, or should not even be capable of being a threat to be used, as a clog on the freedom of the universities to do their work.
