I was discussing the Minister's proposition to spend twenty years on this new University project, and deprecating that intention. It seems to me to be a proposition which must occasion consternation amongst the Governing Body of the University. The suggestion that the University should be transferred to Belfield means, I suppose, that the University will now try to operate for the best part of 20 years in its divided state. It must be a source of very considerable inconvenience to teachers and students.
I was very interested in the Minister's opening statement. I think most of us will be very grateful to him for having dealt so comprehensively with the position in relation to education. We are glad to know that a belated effort is to be made for permission to examine this whole question of higher education for our people. At the present moment there is no doubt that University education in Ireland is the preserve of the wealthy minority. A considerable number of our children are denied access to the opportunities that University education gives to any boy or girl, man or woman.
So far as I am concerned, there is no doubt that the answer to the Minister's query in relation to whether we turn out too many graduates is an unequivocal "no". It is our fault that our society is not sufficiently well developed to absorb the total number of potential graduates in our society who are denied access to higher education, through no fault of their own, but merely because their parents cannot afford the fees. The question which the Minister could appropriately ask with more validity is: "Are we turning out too many illiterates or semi-illiterates?" That is a very much more serious consideration. To restrict the number of University graduates would seem to me to be on a par with the suggestion that we should restrict the amount of land under the plough or restrict the amount of food. There could be no moral justification for it at all.
I found the Commission's Report remarkably disappointing. It was a Commission composed of a number of very highly qualified, talented people. They were asked to make an objective examination of the position of the National University of Ireland in its present situation. Its terms of reference were to inquire into the immediate needs of the National University of Ireland and to advise as to how, in present circumstances, its needs could best be met. The Report, published two years later, recommended that the space requirements of University College, Dublin, in addition to the others, could not be met on or near its present site and they recommended moving to Stillorgan at an expenditure of £7 million.
I think the recommendations are particularly disappointing. I think they are ill-founded. I do not think they are soundly based. I do not think they are reasonable or rational. I do not think they are in the best interests of the National University of Ireland, the city of Dublin or the country as a whole. I am very surprised that there has been this ready acceptance of the findings. While they started out with the intention apparently of seeking a solution of the College's accommodation problem in the vicinity of the main College building in Earlsfort Terrace, they were gradually worked round—quite unreasonably, I believe—to a decision which was already taken.
In 1949, I think, a decision was taken. I was a member of the Government at the time. I was not conscious that the decision we are now discussing was finally taken at that time as far as the Government was concerned. I think a decision was taken by at least one individual and that all of us are now dangling at the end of a string manipulated by that particular individual who was able to impose his will on the rest of us, including this Commission. I do not think it is in the best long-term interests of the University or our society. There was an implied complaint from the Commission that if their terms of reference were different and had they invited views of coordination within the University or over a wider field, other solutions might have presented themselves. I think that, while the terms of reference were limited and undesirably limited, certain considerations entered into the terms of reference, in the first place, the necessity for haste.
I do not agree with Deputy McGilligan's suggestion that there was not haste. There simply had to be haste having regard to the magnitude of the problem at Earlsfort Terrace at the present moment with the overcrowding and the positive inability there must be for students to learn and professors and lecturers to teach competently. The solution for that problem was not to recommend a decision which in the end will militate against the interests of the University.
The cause of that problem was the dilatory attitude of successive Governments over 40 years to this whole question of higher education in all its aspects—the neglect of secondary education and the virtual neglect of higher education. Therefore, we have to set up a Commission with terms of reference which refer to University College, Dublin, because of the urgency of the problem there. In that way it could be said to deny the Commission the right to examine this whole University problem in its proper context, its proper context of course being the position of this great University in the country in the centuries ahead.
I say that the commission was hog-tied by a decision taken by a small group of individuals and that decision caused its failure to realise its own desired objective which was to keep the University within the precincts of the city. The decision by which the Commission was hog-tied was the decision that the University must be what is called the campus type University. There is more than one type of University. There is the Oxford and Cambridge residential type; the red bricked type and the campus type which has buildings spread over a 200, 300, 400 or 500 acre site. It may have advantages but I believe that the advantages of any other type of building, taken in our particular circumstances in Dublin, greatly outweigh any possible advantages there may be in this campus conception of a University.
If the Commission had not been committed, either at the beginning of or throughout their deliberations, by this decision to insist on a campus type University, there would be no difficulty at all in keeping University College, Dublin, here where it belongs, in the heart of the city. This retreat from the heart of this ancient city to the country, to rustication, of what should be a great institution, is the decision of old men. It is a decision of a generation which will not meet the challenge of the demands of the modern, scientific and atomic age. They are living in the days when University settlements were founded in remote places because of their religious associations, such as Glendalough, Clonmacnoise and various other places. But we are living in the atomic age, not in the stone age. The purpose of a University is not to reguild the Book of Kells, or create new Books of Kells. It is to create the technocrats of the modern age as well as to train the professional people.
This decision is a retreat from the demands of modern needs. A University in my notion should be the centre of the whole cultural and educational complex in a society. It should be a heart pumping the blood, a throbbing through the life of a nation—providing the professional men, the scientists, the philosophers, the teachers, the thinkers—to supply the needs of the agricultural industry, or the ordinary textile industries, and our schools and colleges and educational establishments. But it belongs in the heart of any city and we had this unique opportunity of retaining this University within the boundaries of our city and helping it to grow and become part of our life. Now it is to rusticate. The idea is to isolate it from the life of the city, this great ancient city of Dublin, and move it into the suburbs. Because of the insistence on this adhesion to the idea of the campus as opposed to the residential city type of University, every other consideration has been thrown overboard.
There is the question of cost. This will mean a greatly increased cost and I do not put cost as being the most important consideration. This will mean a break with the historic siting of this University which, as the Minister pointed out, had a most poignant and troublesome origin. To the people associated with it, it must have very historic and close ties with many of the people involved in it, Newman and the other, who established this particular kind of University in the face of opposition.
There is the very great practical consideration of the convenience of something in the region of 5,000 students, and I expect about 500 lecturers and professors. This has all been put aside in favour of the idea of the trees and the tree-lined avenues, houses set back amongst the woods, the daffodils, the crocuses and the rest of it. Those are all delightful in theory, but they are impractical in 1960, relatively irrelevant in 1960, in a relatively poor country trying to educate the greatest number of boys and girls, with a relatively small amount of money. It is all very well for the United States of America and these other countries which, by means of the lavish foundations of the industrial magnates, endow great Universities with the campus idea. It is all very well for these people to do that, but I honestly do not think that even if it were desirable—and I do not think it is desirable—we can afford to do it.
I think the general decision is a particularly retrograde one. Some of the remarks made by the Commission suggested they had been away and had had discussions in other countries. They had been assured by people living in Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Reading and various centres such as those, that this decentralisation was a very good idea. Of course it is a very good idea for Sheffield, or Birmingham or Manchester. Many of the people in those places would like to get out to our Stillorgan and get away from the slums and sordid, smoky surroundings of these rather horrible cities in the Black Country in the North of England. But there is no comparison at all between these Black Country cities, towns in the North of England, and Dublin, particularly the part of Dublin about which we are talking.
I think the Commission has been, for its intellectual weight and the calibre of the minds of the men involved, extraordinarily ingenuous in their acceptance of the suggestion by people who do not know as precisely as we do, and as the Commission damn well ought to have known, how things are here in Dublin—the very unique situation which we have here in Dublin. This whole matter has been unnecessarily confused because, no matter what Deputy McGilligan says, it has been hurried by virtue of the crisis in the University in Earlsfort Terrace. That crisis is the product of the inertia on the part of many Governments over a very long time, but I still do not think it justifies our taking a bad decision, and I think this is a bad decision.
I say that our situation here in Dublin is like no other situation anywhere else. I want the University College of Dublin to remain in the heart of the city, integrated with the life of the people of the city, and I do not want it to go into isolation, as it proposes to do. The Commission has not justified its decision to go out to Stillorgan in the light of the possibilities of remaining in the city in the surroundings in which it could create a new, great university. I say our situation here is unique because in this particular area where it was proposed to build a university, we have a remarkable grouping of cultural establishments of the highest order, a remarkably convenient grouping of these cultural establishments of the highest order.
As I said, a University should be at the heart of that cultural and educational complex here in the centre of the city. We have the National Museum, the National Library, these Houses of the Oireachtas, the National Gallery, the Royal College of Physicians, the College of Surgeons and the various other institutional bodies such as the Institute for Advanced Studies. Then there is a matter which I shall deal with later, Trinity College, Dublin, and its great unique library.
In relation to these other cities, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester and so on, when they go out to the surburbs, they have a perfectly good reason. I do not mean to be disrespectful when I say that any sane man living in the city of Birmingham would live outside it if he could or move outside it as quickly as he could. I do not think that is true of Dublin. Even leaving that aside, the surroundings, the pleasant character and nature of the area we are talking about in Dublin, none of these people is leaving behind him these prerequisites to the most ideal cultural-educational unit that any society could devise. If you could sit down and plan for a hundred years, you could not have provided these wonderful buildings all within sight of one another in the heart of the loveliest part of the city of Dublin. There is nothing like the case that there is in the other great British cities, overcrowded, congested and many of them slum-ridden as they are.
Dublin is unique, too, in the fact that in this area we have the "lungs," the green belts, the Merrion Square area, the College Park area, the Stephen's Green area, Leinster Lawn, the lawn at St. Peter's Place and Iveagh Gardens. All of these could become a component part of a great new University in the heart of the city, integrated with it in one way or another. There is not here the overcrowding you find in these industrial cities in the heart of England. There are not the great tenement buildings, one looking down on the other. Even the buildings there are in these areas I have mentioned are relatively sparse. They are the four or five storey houses with very large gardens. There are wide streets.
Again, there is this consideration, that in many of these industrial cities, property is particularly valuable, of high commercial value. Consequently, the acquisition of land in these areas is prohibitive, but it is not prohibitive here. If our people are determined to have this most precious of all things —their premier University in the heart of their capital city—nothing could stop them from acquiring the land in one way or another. Its commercial value is relatively low compared with other cities. There is no great Bond Street, Oxford Street, Grafton Street or O'Connell Street, no shopping centre to be disorganised as a result of the provision of the necessary land in the heart of the city. Then again, unlike Paris, Madrid or Stockholm, there are not great works of art or historic monuments which would preclude our acquiring land and levelling whatever is on that land in order to provide the space needed to build our University.
Therefore, it is sheer rubbish on the part of the Commission and on the part of the Minister to suggest that it is not possible to build this new University in the heart of the city of Dublin. Admittedly, if the Government are committed to find from 200 to 500 acres in order to build the campus type of sprawled University, then of course they have no alternative but to go into rural Ireland, go out to Stillorgan and find it there. But is the Minister committed; and, if he is committed, why is he committed to this campus type of building, rather than to the alternative types of buildings which are open to him, should he wish to provide such a University? The Minister has made no case whatever for this critical decision, the insistence on behalf of somebody that a campus and only a campus type of unit is the one acceptable to us.