This Bill is now going to leave this House, as Senator Quinlan said a moment ago, probably making a record in that it is a politically uncontroversial Bill in which the combined efforts of the Opposition have not succeeded in persuading the Government side that a single amendment put forward deserves either incorporation as it stood or deserves the consideration of the Minister's advisers for the purposes of drawing up a Government amendment. That fact speaks for itself. Somewhere, in the Minister or in his advisers or the people behind him who cannot be seen or who are not responsible to this House or anybody, there is a stubborn mind at work. It may be a well-intentioned mind and a mind with the interests of the people of Ireland at heart, but it is a stubborn and inflexible mind, and that is the last kind of mind that should be brought to bear on educational problems. It is absolutely the last kind of mind that should have a determining say in problems of higher education. I hope that we in this House and the Deputies in the other House are not going to live to regret the day that we allowed ourselves to be dictated to by this mind, whoever it may belong to, in the way in which we obviously have been over the last three weeks.
It is a Bill with serious defects. I do not want to raise the banner of alarm or to alarm the public in any way, but it has serious defects and they are defects which are patent on the face of the Bill. The defects of the 1908 Irish Universities Act, under which we are still functioning, were not patent on the face of the Bill. The defects which that Bill contained became evident over the course of years with the independence of this part of the country, with the changing of social conditions and of social perspectives, and with the broadening of opportunities arising for ordinary people who had not previously had them.
These natural, social and economic developments lay bare the defects of the 1908 Irish Universities Act. At the time that Act was passed it was hard to see, looking at it now, that it had any serious defects or that any serious room for abuse was left by it. That is not the case with the Bill to which we are now saying "goodbye" in this House. Let anybody in the future who finds himself at loggerheads with the Authority or the Minister go back to the debates of this House and he will find that the deficiencies of this Bill have been unremittingly pointed out with varying degrees of eloquency and efficiency by people on this side of the House on all the occasions in which it has been debated here.
I am not going to give the House a resumé of all the various arguments which we have put forward. The whole thing can be condensed very simply. We are being asked to make, as Senator Quinlan said, an act of faith in the persistence of a reasonable frame of mind in people who are as yet unborn, people who are not yet in power, people who have not yet come into formal political life or into formal official life. We are being asked to make an act of faith in a Bill which patently gives too much discretion to the wrong people. It gives too much discretion to the Minister, in regard to the designation of institutions. It gives too much discretion to the Minister and the Government in regard to the hiring and firing of the members of the Authority. It gives too much discretion to the Authority in regard to the requiring of information from institutions of higher education and it gives too much discretion to the Authority in regard to the imposition of conditions. It gives a most dangerous discretion to the Authority in regard to allowing the Authority's functions to be performed on its behalf by one of its officers or servants.
The Authority is composed of people not one of whom is required to be a full-time academic. Not one of the members of the Authority is required to be a person whose main commitment in life is to the very ideal this Bill and this Authority is supposed to be promoting. These are very serious defects and it would be a matter of surprise to me—I do not say that in any sense of gloating because it may be that we on this side of the House will be the people who will have to deal with those difficulties when they arise—if the defects which this Bill contains and the abuses to which it opens the door do not become a matter of public knowledge and public grievance within a period of five to ten years.
I am extremely disappointed at the way the Government have approached this Bill. I am extremely disappointed with the way in which a reasonable human being, like this Minister, has approached non-politically intended amendments advanced from this side. I am extremely disappointed that this Bill should have been dictated and run through both Houses by a mind obviously stubborn and inflexible to the last degree and the kind of mind, therefore, which should be kept far away from anything to do with education.
