Irish higher education is in its dark age. Chronic underinvestment being the source of the decline shouldn’t come as surprise given the warnings from senior higher education figures recently.
But as far as debates on exchequer funding are concerned, higher education typically does little to capture the imagination. This is unsurprising, as national crises in housing and health are felt far more acutely by the general public.
Furthermore, when thrown a passing glance, higher education appears to be in acceptable shape. Students and their parents aren’t typically concerned with the ideals of research and pedagogical excellence; they see higher education as the final step towards adulthood, towards a photo for the livingroom and the first real job. From their perspective, it all seems to be ticking along.
But the reality is that our higher education system can no longer compete internationally — it is now in a phase of undevelopment. It is frightening to think that, only a short few decades from now, that piece of paper on the wall might be worth a whole lot less. Sustained neglect by successive government programmes has devalued our degrees, greatly impoverished student experience, and constrained the ability of researchers to positively impact Irish life and society.
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The most galling part of it all is that our universities played a central role in the transformation of Ireland into a modern society, a political and cultural power capable of punching far above its weight. But now that we’ve arrived, the reward for all that was cultivated in lecture theatres and seminar rooms is disregard, one might even say betrayal.
According to the Government’s own 2022 Funding the Future report, Irish higher education requires an additional €307 million in annual core funding if performance targets are to be achieved.
This month’s budget was the third since that report was published: Budget 2023 provided €40.5 million, followed by €65.2 million in 2024, while Budget 2025 delivered an additional €50 million, rising to a further €150 million by 2029. These figures are startling: if given until the end of the decade, the Government would not close the funding gap they identified.
When a government publicises a funding shortage in a particular domain and then fails to address that shortage, the reason can only be ideological — higher education is no longer valued by the State.
But numbers can be so arbitrary; what needs to be more apparent is how this underfunding impacts the sector in real terms. That reality is stark.
At some of Ireland’s most prestigious universities, staff do not have access to the most basic resources, commonplace enterprise software, and sometimes even stationary (yes, this is true). Take a tour around a campus and you may encounter staff and students housed in prefabs, or even worse, staff without any office space at all.
The bleaker this experience gets, the fewer students will engage with campus life in a meaningful way. There was a time when our campuses were alive with undergraduates, shuffling between lectures and the library, huddled late into the evening, over some (affordable) food or a pint, debating the day’s learnings with their peers. The ideas, debates, networks and partnerships that transformed Ireland emerged out of this environment. Now, our campuses are becoming increasingly quiet, partly because the cost of education means students have to work more, but also because the necessity of cost-cutting has deprived staff and students of any catering services in the evening.
In terms of research — which should feed everything at an institute of higher education, most notably, what students are being taught — many staff are denied access to resources which, internationally, are a given at any reputable institute. High-performance computing, server space, research databases and funding for activities like conference participation and archival research are all luxuries to most researchers in Ireland.
Desperate to provide their own resources, staff now spend a significant amount of time pursuing external funding opportunities. Instead of researching and giving time to students, they are filling out lengthy grant proposals, a practice which is encouraged by universities, equally desperate for the financial gains that come from grant capture. The few academics who do secure funding will inevitably use that success to leverage themselves more favourable terms at home or elsewhere, leading to a football manager approach to recruitment and promotion that skews any sense of true excellence in research and teaching, warps institutional hierarchies, and rewards individualism.
No organisation should function in such a manner, reducing the effectiveness of an employee to their ability to fund their workplace resources.
Retiring or departed staff often go unreplaced, draining units of essential expertise and experience while also increasing the amount of teaching and administration carried by an increasingly small — and often precarious — pool of workers.
In most global wellbeing metrics, Ireland doesn’t fare too badly. Higher education plays a significant role in the calculation of such rankings, and so a lack of investment in our universities is equivalent to a lack of commitment to the social, cultural, and economic prosperity of the nation.
Innovation, critical thinking, and the creation of new knowledge are evolutionary processes that, when allowed to flourish, have the potential to solve the grand challenges of our time. Traditionally, universities were a hotbed for such evolution, serving the public good through the advancement of ideas and the betterment of people positioned to make our world a more equitable and liveable place. But decades of underinvestment have given rise to an intellectual malaise, hindering our ability to innovate for ourselves. Our future has been taken from the hands of the public and sold to private entities provisioned to move at ten times the pace of our universities.
As a country which once privileged the value of education, we should be deeply ashamed that we have effectively stood by and allowed our institutes of higher education to rot.
James O’Sullivan lecturers in digital humanities at University College Cork. He is on secondment to the Higher Education Authority as a policy adviser. He is writing in a personal capacity.
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