 I ask my own chief job to keep everyone to time, can we begin. It's my great pleasure to thank you to the IEA for inviting me to chair this panel and it's my pleasure to welcome these guests. I won't waste any more time because we want to hear from them. So I'll just introduce them briefly from my right is Kingasouly, he's from the head of our education sector in DG of the European Commission. I mean Professor I'm Gislea McGee, who is Innovation and Education Policy on behalf of IVEC, and Jim Miley, who is the Director General of the IUA. So we start with Kinga. There will be time at the end for questions. My first slide is just a recapitulative of what the EU is doing on education on higher education. It's a national competence education, so as it said in the treaties, the EU's role is to support states in their higher education policy. There are three main things we are doing in this support role. We are building evidence-based agendas, prepare recommendations for the member states collecting data to have the relevant knowledge to build these policies on. We also organize policy cooperation and support peer learning activities among member states and stakeholder organizations, also to help member states to learn from each other when they are building their education policy. And of course we have some financial means, program funding for individuals and also for organizations. The Erasmus Plus program, I'm sure it's well known everywhere. The Horizon 2020 program for supporting research and also the European structural investment funds. It's a very important source of development for higher education, especially in the Eastern member states. So if we speak about policy setting or agenda setting for policy making, this is just a snapshot of our new initiative, the building of the European education area, with the main key points, what we are suggesting, mutual recognition of diplomas, the creation of European universities and the creation of an EU student card. All these initiatives target greater mobility and this is just what we recently finalized, a council recommendation on mutual recognition of diplomas. So the negotiations will now start in the European Council about that. We have the renewed agenda for higher education with our four key initiatives on excellence and skills development, inclusive and connected systems, higher education innovation and effective and efficient higher education system. For example, we are now in the process of managing a pilot European Graduate Survey. Right now only in eight member states in the EU, but the plan is to extend it and have a European-vised Graduate Survey where it's clear what are the added value of higher education in the different member states. We have the Bologna process and with this I would like to turn to the data collection and the comparative statistics we are providing to help member states setting their agenda. There was the ministerial conference in May, less than a month ago in Paris. There we published the implementation report on the Bologna key commitment. This is the first chart I selected. This is a comparative statistics of funding of higher education in the 48 Bologna countries. It's quite small, unfortunately. Ireland is on the lower part of the scale. So it's circled in red. I don't know if it's visible. So it's clear that most of the Bologna member countries spend more on higher education than Ireland. As I heard also from the previous speakers, funding is a real challenge for the Irish education system. The European University Association in their funding observatory calls it an aggravating decline of the Irish higher education funding. It's also quite visible that why there was recently some increase in funding for teaching or stuff. The level of funding for infrastructure is not declining. There is a decrease of funding for research. It's also shown here that the upper part of the graph is the annual expenditure on research, on non-research-related funding for higher education, and the lower part is the R&D-related funding. If we turn to the student perspective, I show you data from another very recent publication, which is the Euro student survey. It's done in all Erasmus member countries, so in 33 countries. I selected this graph because it's quite interesting to see that in terms of student expenditures, Ireland has the lowest amount what students need to spend on housing, food and communications, so the basic needs. While if we go for student expenses related to education, it's the other end. Ireland is on the other end. With 35% of the student total expenditure, it's the most. But if we add up the two, it's about 70% what students in Ireland spend on living and fees. So the free income of students, what they can spend on other non-necessarily expenditure is around 20%. With that, Ireland is relatively expensive for students. It's comparable to France or some other expensive countries. While in Netherlands, for example, or in Finland, the free income of students, what they can spend is around 30-32%. This is again a comparative study, which is on working students. On average, 51% of students are working during studies, and there is no big difference between the different member states. So there are countries where it's about 10% higher from lower. Ireland is around the average. But if we look at the amount of time students spend on working, Ireland, with 25 hours average, is on the lower end. While in the Eastern European states, work is much more important for students. And it's very relevant for the general perspective of students themselves. Because those who are primarily working, they don't consider themselves students. They consider themselves as employees, and they just work, they just study as a secondary activity. The next slide is just so that we prepare figures for education institutions. These are the working groups we are organizing. I also wanted to show you the Education Monitor 2017 figures very quickly. The tertiary education attainment is amazingly high in Ireland, much higher than the average, which is 39%, while it is 52%. The only figure where Ireland is below the average is adult participation in learning. I skipped because of time, and finally I wanted to show you the financial means that you offer. It's a brand new paper that came out, the new financial perspectives, the commission is preparing. We propose to double the budget for the Erasmus Plus programme, and triple the number of students who can participate in mobility for the next period from 2021 to 2027. We also propose a high increase for the research funds. It will be called Horizon Europe, not Horizon 2020, about 100 billion euros for the next perspective. We would like also to boost the invest EU funding through the European Investment Bank, which offers loans, guarantees and other innovative financial means also for higher education. Around 4 billion euros that are set for social investment under that paper. This is just what I wanted to quickly show you. If there are any questions, of course, I'm happy to open them up. Thank you very much, and it's a pleasure to be here this afternoon to talk a little bit about how we might move towards a sustainable funding model for higher education in Ireland. I think there are a number of points that are generally agreed. The first of those would be that the reason that we need to re-look at the funding of higher education is because the massification of higher education over the last 50 years. Peter made a reference to that in his talk. Within 50 years, participation has moved from approximately 5% of the population to, as we've seen from the slide here, more than 50%. That's a huge increase and dramatically affects the economies of how universities and higher education in general can be funded. We've seen over a period of time then a need for countries to reassess how they fund higher education. That need hasn't been so critical in the US because traditionally much more of that education was privately funded and so consequently the system was much more scalable. I think the other thing that's generally agreed is that higher education brings both a public benefit and a private benefit. There are numerous studies that attempt to quantify that. One can take issue with individual studies, but all of that research points to there being a significant public benefit and a significant private benefit. In terms of the Irish system, the report that Peter's group did was an extraordinary piece of work. I say that as being a sceptic when Rory originally set up that group. I was questioning where the expert bit fitted in to the members of that group with no insult intended to those members because the report that was done was an extraordinary piece of work. It genuinely looked around the world at how this problem was being addressed. It looked at the Irish system and came out with a very reasonable quantification of what additional funding was needed. I have not heard one person take issue with the figures within that report or with the range of options that are presented in the report. Congratulations, Peter. It was an extraordinary piece of work. The question is then how we can advance from there. I thought in terms of my own talk since Peter has basically covered all of that, it would be useful to reflect. I'm probably the only person in this room and perhaps in Ireland that has been through this debate now three times. Once in Australia over 30 years ago, where the income contingent loan scheme was born, then about six or seven years ago in the UK, and now we've been participating in this debate for the last almost five years. I thought it would be worthwhile from that point of view to reflect on what I'd seen there. The Australian experience was one where the higher education system had been free, totally free, with the exception that you had to pay your student union dues before they would let you enroll. I vividly remember that the cost of those fees was $270, which in those days was a lot of money for a student. If you were a conscientious objector and you didn't want to fund the student union, you had to give the $270 to charity before they would let you enroll in the university, but there was no fees associated with your enrollment. That system as the massification came and the number of people participating in higher education in Australia increased, became unfundable by the Australian government and they had to move to a new system. The system that they came up with was the system that was called a higher education contribution scheme. As you'd be aware, the Australians are very keen on fair play. In Australia everything has to be fair. Having decided that there was a public benefit and a private benefit to higher education, then a report was done in Australia which split the courses into a number of broad bans, so engineering, law, science, education, arts and humanities, etc. Then a piece of work was done to work out what was the private benefit for each of those courses and how much did the course cost to deliver. For each of those banded subjects, a decision was made in terms of how much of the cost of delivery should be borne by the state and how much should be borne by the individual. For example, law is a relatively cheap course to deliver, but the returns to the individuals, particularly in Australia, were very high. To get a law degree in Australia, you would then pay a significant component as a private contribution, whereas for engineering it was a high cost subject. The returns were somewhat more modest than the lawyers, and I say this as an engineer. There was a more balanced sharing of the cost of the course between the individual and the state. With that piece of work done, the system was rolled out with what has now been called an income contingent loan scheme. The advantage of that was that Australia went from this situation of it was totally free to go to university to it was still free at point of entry, so no one was disadvantaged through that scheme. There was some initial resistance, but what I found at the time as an academic was it really focused the minds of the students when they came in in first year. So they had made a decision that they really wanted to be at university. They realised they'd have a debt to pay at the end of it, and they focused much more on their studies than they did before that. Now I'm sure that's not the case in Ireland, but it's worth saying that that was the case in Australia. Now in the Australian system, the financial aid to the students is not part of that income contingent loan scheme. It's fully means tested if you qualify for financial aid, then you are given financial aid and there is no expectation of that being paid back. So it means that everyone that graduates from law in Australia graduates with the same student debt as it's now called to pay back, the same contribution to pay back, and we know that they'll all get jobs which will have basically the same private benefit. That's a fair scheme. Now fast forward to my experience in the UK. When the UK government considered a change to the system there, which the Conservatives thought, well the Australian system is all very well, but wouldn't it be even better if the students paid for everything? And of course that's not a suggestion that's made in Peter's report, but that was exactly how the debate panned out in the UK. And it wasn't a debate because the UK government, shock horror, did not consult with anyone within the sector in terms of what their proposals would be, to the extent that they told us that we were to set our fees between £6,000 and £9,000 a year, and we were to not to consult with each other in setting those fees. And then they financed their loan system on the basis the average fee would be £7,500, because obviously if you set the bottom at 6 and the top at 9, that would be the average fee. Now when each university individually decided what their fee would be, as you would recall, of 136 universities in the UK, 134 came with an answer of £9,000 and two mugs came with an answer of £7,500. I won't name those universities, they quickly changed their view the next year. So it shows you what happens if you don't consult with the sector. The other part of the UK system which I found entirely unfair was that then they lumped the student financial aid onto the loan system. So now students from disadvantaged backgrounds graduated from the same programs as their classmates, but with higher loans to pay back. So there were a whole range of things that were wrong in the UK system that in an Irish system we could get right. So I think that those are some observations, but the common thing about both systems was that a courageous political decision was made to make a change. So the problem was recognised, a courageous decision was made to make a change, and then those changes will work through relatively quickly. After a couple of years in Australia it kind of drifted in the background and became the norm. We've seen for a range of reasons in the UK basically because it was a very poorly constructed system to start with that hasn't quite happened. But the main message that I'd have is it takes political courage, it takes someone with vision and the willingness to make it happen. Thank you Laura, and I suppose I just want to add to the comments to Peter and your expert group with the report, because from an IBEC perspective we would agree that it's perhaps the most authoritative and balanced document that we can enable a discussion around the future funding of higher education. And I also just want to kind of commend the Institute and the Higher Education Authority for bringing that back onto the table now. And really the perspective I want to give with you today is since the publication of the report and in light of last week's QS rankings is talking about what has happened from that perspective from a business environment. And I'm going to talk around kind of the international reputation that the business environment in Ireland is working with them. So a couple of things have really happened since 2016 since that report was published. We are under intense pressure around our competitiveness and around that international reputation. Ireland in that period of time has failed to deliver on a couple of key infrastructural projects be that the development of data centres in the west of the country, the National Children's Hospital and further and higher education is just another one of those failures to invest. And as a result it's having an impact on our international competitiveness. And recent publications through the National Competitive Council and the refresh of Enterprise 2025 has highlighted this stark, I suppose, lens in which we now need to look at and how Ireland is actually losing momentum in our ability to actually foster and develop a talent pipeline for business to actively attract foreign direct investment and to stimulate innovation within our indigenous sector. So the talent crisis is not just acute in Ireland. It's a global crisis. And we are, the companies who are based here in Ireland are hiring internationally. So all eyes are on this. It's a shared global phenomenon. And how we respond to this will matter. And the world is watching in terms of who's doing most to address this challenge. And mobile investment is chasing down where that investment is moving to. So we know that research and investment is incredibly mobile. And the ability to deliver talented people and well rounded people. So companies are moving to where they can get staff, not necessarily where those natural resources traditionally used to lie. So that's that international competitive dynamic that I wanted to highlight. Companies, as I mentioned, are moving, they're relocating in that. So they're looking at competitiveness through a new lens. We know that our tax attractiveness, we're losing ground on that one. So therefore the companies who are embedded into our economy here are now looking at competitiveness through the talent, as I mentioned, the potential to develop intellectual property in Ireland and also through innovation. And interestingly enough, higher education is at the nexus of all three of those. So again, another strong rationale to fund that. So who really is getting their act together? Do we have a plan? I think we don't have a shortage of ambition in this country. We don't have a shortage of strategy. But what we lack is a detailed and resource implementation to get us to our ambition. Be that to be the innovation leader and be that to have the best education over the next decade. So how do we develop that plan with committed resources? And to Andrew's comments, that takes political will, it takes cross party political will, and it takes a collaborative partnership approach from all of us around that. The way in which I suppose the education sector must fundraise a present in terms of targeting, be it the department deeper, or be it through the Department of Education and Skills, on an annual basis to get incremental funding year on year, does not enable strategic planning for the sector. It does not enable the sector to respond appropriately to the challenges of the future of work, to the future of our society, and in many of those grand challenges that we face, both in Ireland and internationally. So we need to start moving towards this multi-annual nature of funding. Similar to how we actually plan for other national strategic investments of critical importance. So I was very glad to hear Peter reiterate the point that we do not want to see just a bandage approach to fix the current problem that we actually need to push beyond that boundary and think about the future because again, back to how can Ireland be prepared to adapt and to create those, the global citizens and well-rounded and flexible learners for the future that both higher education, further education and industry can all work together. I just very quickly, and I suppose to enable a bit of Q&A afterwards, what we need to make sure as well is around business, the role of business in all of this, I think it goes without saying business currently contributes quite substantially to higher education. Be that through the National Training Fund and we saw the increase in that levy. So in 2017, business through that fund is about 450 million, 2018 it's going to look like 550 million. So there's a significant amount of cash going into that, not only through research and innovation projects, through employers being actually active within the classroom, through program review, through in cash and in kind contributions, through philanthropy and equally around work placement and we know that there is a strategic goal there to increase the work placement. So taking students actually out of the classroom bringing them in into the business environment again is where enterprise are very much committed to delivering on our national ambitions. So maybe my closing points is international reputation matters. The rankings, while they're crude and they have limitations, they matter. They're a metric in which it's used, not necessarily by us but against us and we need to be able to respond appropriately to that. So my last question is, do we have a plan on what is that plan going to be and how can we resource an action upon that plan? Thank you, Chair. And like others, I'd like to commend Peter and his group for the excellent analysis. Usually when you start out trying to solve a problem, you're trying to look at the root causes and the analysis and looking at the solutions. And one of the benefits we have in this scenario is there is a very clear analysis as good as you could get on any problem in any sector and some very clear and succinct options for solving it. One of the challenges with the problem is, I guess, is the fact that this is a crisis but it's not immediately seen to be a crisis. I describe it as a rotting bridge. It's not a burning bridge but it's a wooden bridge that is slowly rotting. And it's a Claire's point. We get to a point somewhere along the way where the bridge begins to collapse and the quality that we've spent over 100 years or in certain of our institutions, hundreds of years building up a reputation in higher level education could quite quickly evaporate and I think that's the scale of the problem. Kinga referenced some European League tables and I'd recommend you should Google... The European University Association have been tracking funding in university systems across 34 systems across Europe, broader Europe. So if you Google EUA funding observatory, you can download their latest report. And it interestingly groups countries into five categories. There are those with signs of recovery and this is kind of tracking it over 10 years. There are those who are making what they describe as cautious steps forward. There are those with a continuing commitment to investment and no surprise that has Austria, Germany and Luxembourg in there. And then there's a small group who are described as in aggravating decline. And that's the group we're in. And it's us and it's Spain and it's a very small number of countries in the Balkans. You know, not the kind of place you want to be in any kind of league table. Then there's some other special cases in a fifth grouping. So, you know, when we look at this crisis, we need to look at it in this context. You know, we are benchmarked, whether we like it or not, international students of whom there are 10,000 or 15% of our total student population now, sorry, way more than 10,000 in our system. They're looking at rankings, they're looking at our reputation in coming here and there are some cases that Claire has spoken about are very much looking at our reputation and our capacity in higher level education. So we've got this challenge and we've, you know, I would describe, there's a challenge of bridging the gap in funding that Peter has very clearly laid out. And then we have, I think there's a three-dimensional challenge to follow that. We know, and this is a fact, we will have to teach more students in more flexible ways in the next decade and more. We have 40,000 coming into the system by 2030. On current trend, 25,000 of those will go to the universities. But even if that balance changes, you know, that's the order of it. We know that we need to increase the scale and scope of our investment in research and innovation and that's a key part of what we need to do for the economy. And we know that we need to expand access for students and increase our engagement with communities and with industry. I mean, they are the given facts. So the funding challenge has to be set in that context. I think the issues around funding has been well articulated, so I won't go over that again. I do want to come back to another dimension of the challenge that Peter laid out before us. And that this is the solution here rests in an integrated approach. And that does mean that we need change within the system as well and the system very well recognizes that. But we also need to have change in how the system is run. So Peter referenced the fact that at the moment 64, 65% of the money going into third level comes from the state. But actually there are individual institutions, some represented in this room, where only about a third of their money is currently coming from the state. But, and here's the big but, there is 100% state control on whole aspects of what they do. So no university or institute of technology can hire or fire or pay people what they want. They are subject to the employment control framework. They have no flexibility and no capacity. So Peter's point about the need for flexibility and nimblness in the system is an absolute given for the future. But in the current structure that flexibility and nimblness simply isn't there. So we need the structures and the overall framework within which third level education is run. This isn't a linear system like having three and a half thousand secondary schools, all of which do largely the same thing and have a fixed curriculum. All of the institutions are completely different. They are on the opposite end of the spectrum to that. And all of the international evidence tells us that the most flexible and nimble institutions are the ones that do best. And I think the solution that we have to find here is not, I won't say not just, because primarily it is about getting more funding into the system. But alongside that we need to have a structure that the system operates in that allows us to perform to its best. And I think if we approach it in that way then I think we have a meaningful chance of success. But that does require a change in thinking. Universities can't be regarded just as another part of the public service. They are much more akin to semi-state type institutions. And certainly they can and should have public funding into the future. We do not want to go the American system or to do the about turn that the UK did. We should have a blended system but that does require a change, a change in thinking at government level in terms of how the system is run. The last point I want to make is I suppose about the political difficulty of this. And we are in a log jam. We have the solutions all on the table but nobody is prepared to embrace them because there is perceived to be a major political challenge about taking on fees or loans or anything like that. So let's reflect on that for a moment. How big is that challenge? As a country we have just done the most difficult thing politically that you could think of. We have repealed an amendment relating to abortion. And we did it with by and large political consensus. We went through a difficult but a very controlled process and we reached a decision at the end of it. Now if as a country and if as a political system and this isn't just about government it's about the entire political system and the decision makers within it. If we have a capacity to take on and deal with an issue such as abortion then surely we can sort of higher level education before breakfast. So I'll just ask you please to hold your questions for a moment. We're going to give the first response to I suppose the most important stakeholder which is our students so I welcome Michael Kerrigan, president of the UCI. The perspective of the union of students in Ireland in regards to future funding of higher education is not something that will surprise many people in this room. When it comes to the castles report UCI and students are in favour of option one a public funded system for higher education. Back in October we held a demonstration with thousands of students marching from the custom house to the department of the teacher. I gave a speech there but before I did I was looking at what to say and what I would talk about. I said I'd have a look at the countries across Europe and across the world that offered fully publicly funded higher education. The countries you'd expect to see there were all there Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Austria and Germany. We had also seen Estonia, Czech Republic, Greece, Turkey and Argentina but the country offering publicly funded education without fees that I came up on most web searches that really surprised me was Ireland. At 3,000 euro Ireland is the 8th highest fees in the world second highest in the EU and after Brexit will have the highest third level fees in the European Union. And yet we still advertise as having free fees and free education. We have a grant scheme that has been mentioned that covers this for 46% of students. But who are that other 54%? There are students who refuse a grant because their parents had just gone over the low threshold in the grant scheme. There are the students who refuse a grant because they worked in their part time job last year. There are the students who refuse a grant because of their parents income without any consideration of whether they would receive support from their parents. There are the students who refuse a grant because they did not have a utility bill in their name. There are the students who have become estranged or independent from their parents but are still refused because they are under 23 years of age. Since 2008 we have seen a 375% increase in the student contribution. And what have we gotten in return? Falling university rankings, the majority of institutes of technology in financial difficulty, staff and students who are teaching, who are overpaid or underpaid and overworked, and facilities that are not fit for purpose. As a percentage of GDP, Ireland invests the second least in education in the OECD. 1.2% of GDP in higher education compared to the 1.6% of the OECD average. To suggest that the only way to fix this is with an income contingent loan is dangerous. A student loan scheme would cost this country 10 billion over the next 12 years. It's estimated it would take at least 17 years for it to become self-financing and we'd lose 13 million a year in debt written off from graduates who have emigrated. But we have no idea what the cost of losing our most talented and highly educated young people will be. An Iraqis Library report from last November suggests that international evidence suggests that the ultimate success of an ICL is linked to the level of default in the system. Of particular relevance is the means by which repayments should be collected from immigrant graduates. Two thirds of those immigrating from Ireland are graduates. The OECD estimates that Australia has a 3% of high skilled immigration rate. The UK is 11% and Ireland is 21%. It's likely that Ireland will have a much higher cost by writing off debt from immigrants. What will be the economic cost of our young people further delaying life milestones? In New Zealand student loans have directly caused students and graduates being rejected mortgages and has led to a huge increase in the number of people in their late 20s and early 30s living at home. A student loan scheme will mean the student contribution raising to a minimum of four or five thousand euro and I say minimum because in every country that has implemented this scheme has followed. In the UK in 1998 loan schemes were implemented at 1,000 pounds per year. Since then that has increased to 9,250 per year and has also resulted in maintenance grants being turned in to loans for the most vulnerable. They also have seen a 40% decline in part-time mature students. Australia having considerably lower number of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds attending third level than Ireland and the HGA national access plan committed to promoting access from underrepresented groups and all evidence shows loan schemes will work against this. A student loan scheme will mean that if you have 20,000 euro that's how much you'll pay for your education. If you don't have 20,000 euro you'll pay a lot more. It means that those who do not do the best financially with their degrees will pay less than those who do not. Mature students do not have an equal access to the labour market. Students with disabilities do not have an equal access to the labour market. Students who are loan parents do not have an equal access to the labour market. We still have a gender pay gap that sees women earn 12% less than men. An income contingent loan will mean that mature students, students with disabilities, loan parents and women will pay the most for their education and the wealthy will pay the least. We are a generation that has already taken on one lifetime of debt and we're not taking another one. Higher education is a public good and should be treated as an investment rather than a cost. For every euro invested in higher education there is a return of investment for four euro to the economy. There are significant social dividends coming from investing in higher education in terms of strengthening democracy, improving social inclusion and political stability, reducing crime rates and enhancing public welfare. But free education has always been resisted in Ireland. When the idea of free second level education was being debated in the 60s, transition from primary to second level was at 16%, yet this is what came from the report from the Council of Education. The qualified scheme of secondary education for all would be both financially impractical and educationally unsound. Only minority would be capable of benefiting from such an education and standards would fall. 50 years later we are being told the same story. In budget 2011 and 2012 the student grant was cut significantly through payments, thresholds and adjacency rates. Since then we have seen a drastic increase in the cost of going to college, especially the cost of student accommodation which is spiralling out of control. We have long distances and missing lectures to be able to take public transport home. We have heard hundreds of students sleeping in overcrowded accommodation, staying at hostels and sleeping on floors. We have heard from a student in Cork who would stay in college until the building closed would sleep under a bridge until it reopened in the morning. And we are sick of hearing these stories. We are sick of seeing students homeless and living in poverty. Earlier today we launched a position paper which is down in the back of the room on the future funding of higher education for publicly funded higher education. The coalition is made up of the union students in Ireland, the Irish second level students union, the teachers union of Ireland, the Irish Federation of University teachers, the force of trade union and SIP2. The six unions involved in this coalition represent students at second level and third level, academic staff, professional management and support staff and are united in the belief that not only is public funded higher education desirable, it's achievable if the political will is there. A change in thinking and approaches acquired away from viewing higher education as a mere line of spending to that of public investment which yields a guaranteed long term return. This is necessary if we are to properly recognise the importance of higher education as a social good that enhances the civic and social life of this state. Thank you.