Previously I was making the point about the composition of the Senate of the National University of Ireland and suggesting that since in October next they will have been in office for five years and since efforts at University reform have been going on for more than two years they will have had the opportunity in those years to have dug themselves in. They will be in a position now to influence the outcome of the final settlement in regard to NUI and our whole university problem very much. They are, in fact, experts at digging in and resisting change and they will have been in office for five years. They will have had a great deal of warning of what is to come. In fact the inadequacies of the Senate of NUI have contributed in large part to the present university crisis that exists. They are inadequacies that cover the whole range of university education. I do not propose to detail them now but we will have an opportunity later to go into them. There have been inadequacies in the whole policy in regard to the number of graduates from various faculties and a failure in planning so that we turned out to quite an extraordinary degree doctors, and members of the other professions, for export.
We did not tailor our university output to our national needs and we have not been able to harness the university as a power house of ideas which would serve to solve many of the national problems which are not political but technical ones. If we think of the university as an area bounded by the sea, an extremely complicated area, and if the university by the origin of that word is something which, by the very word itself is meant to cater for every aspect of life, then the failure to bring together the different strands of the nation into a single university has damaged all the strands of the nation and made them less able to understand each other and to contribute the specific virtues they possess. We have not had the training to get these different bits of the nation to live together through a university. We have not had reforms in regard to the sort of professional graduate who would be much more responsive to his duties to the country as a whole. I would lay that particular charge before the medical and legal professions, and to some extent my own veterinary profession, because this is the failure of university training. Many of these professions are concerned only with the price for which they will sell their services and but little concerned with the contribution their expertise can make to the national well-being. This seems to me the great reason for not leaving the Senate intact.
Above all, there is the failure to make the universities in their own structure as democratic as they should be. The current cry is, of course, for democracy for students, participation by students in the running of the university. They have an unanswerable right to such participation and some of the foolish things they do they might be less inclined to do if they could contribute in a constructive way to the university. That right does not extend only to students. Perhaps it extends more profoundly to subordinate levels of staff. We have a structure which is stifling the younger, less senior members of staff and is not enabling them to contribute to the limit of their ability to the development of the university as a whole.
The essence of the argument for the rapid passing of this Bill is that since the thing is going to be drastically reorganised let us leave the Senate as it is for the moment prior to the reorganisation. But, that Senate is going to have a major influence on the sort of reorganisation that comes and, personally, although I do not wish to discuss the merger at this moment per se or any other way, I want to see the breaking up of the entrenched power blocs in both the universities in Dublin which are resisting change, very often in the interests of their own faculty or their own position inside their own faculty.
It seems to me that the opportunity of re-electing and also the use of the nominations, which is of 13 out of 35 people, should be taken to change the composition of the Senate now to bring it more into line with opinions now than they were five years ago. There have been five years of immense change. If we are to have the overdue university reform, then we might well start, rather than finish, by having the greatest possible change in the composition of the Senate itself and for that reason I think this request on the part of the Minister is ill-advised.