IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, said that the funding cuts are occurring at a time when the number of people seeking to attend Higher Education is the highest in the history of the state and will exacerbate the trend towards forced emigration of a generation of our young people.

“Higher Education must be developed to fulfil its potential as a contributor to our society and economy and not subject to automatic cuts in Budgetary considerations,” Mike Jennings said.

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

In a recent Determination, the Labour Court upheld a Rights Commissioner Decision that UCC should pay an IFUT member the amount of redundancy payment claimed by IFUT, statutory redundancy plus four weeks. UCC was represented in the Labour Court by one of the most expensive legal firms in Ireland at taxpayers’ expense. IFUT is now advised that, incredibly, UCC has retained this expensive law firm and have embarked upon a very costly appeal to the High Court, allegedly “on a point of law”.

IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, says the Minister should intervene “to prevent the college squandering more than 20 times the payment due to a former employee on a spurious legal adventure which seems designed purely to defer the payment. This is not a case of IFUT seeking more money from government. Instead it is asking the Department of Education to step in to prevent a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money”.

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

Documentation on the case, including IFUT’s letter to the Minister, is available here.

“Our members were very wise not to accept the original proposal which was like being asked to buy a pig in a poke. But, by their vote today, they have indicated that the hard work put in by IFUT negotiators at national level has delivered a much less damaging and more tolerable set of proposals”, said Mike Jennings, IFUT General Secretary.

The results announced by IFUT today were as follows: 83.5% voted in favour and 16.5% voted against the clarified deal. There was a 42% turnout.

Mike Jennings said: “IFUT hopes that following this vote the focus will now shift to the massive productivity savings already given quite freely and generously by our members in recent years. The result is that we have a world-class system, which is providing higher education to more students than ever before in Ireland’s history, and it is being provided with drastically reduced resources, including significant pay cuts.”

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

Minister Quinn stated, “We have a very talented workforce, but the loss of employment in traditional sectors such as construction, manufacturing and retail has meant that many of these qualified and experienced people are now out of work. At the same time, we know that there are skills shortages in certain areas. By providing focused up-skilling and retraining programmes, such as those offered through Springboard, we can match those vacancies with a newly re-skilled workforce and get people back to work.”

Potential students will apply online though Bluebrick.ie, which is the central clearing system for part time courses. Further information on programmes is also available on Bluebrick.ie.

The HEA Press Release is available here.

Up to 4,000 young and gifted Researchers are being placed in constant insecurity and encouraged to think of their jobs as transitory and short-term, with little recognition, poor pay and no thanks or loyalty from their employers, Mr Jennings states.

“The new university policy, which stipulates that all new employment be on a fixed-term or fixed-purpose contract, is a direct challenge to Irish law and to the European Directive and Framework Agreement upon which that law is based.

“It is being introduced by universities, at the behest of the HEA, while these very same institutions call for greater commitment to research, ask our children to pursue careers in this area and issue high-minded but clearly hypocritical pronouncements about the need for a ‘smart economy’”, , Mr Jennings says.

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

Commenting on a report in The Irish Times on 4 March last, IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, said there is no evidence whatever to support suggestions that the Department of Education has ‘lost patience’ with the Federation. “Rather, it has been IFUT that has expressed unease at the ’slow bicycle race’ nature of the process and it would appear that other vested interests have adopted an approach of ‘getting their retaliation in first’. In addition, IFUT wishes to clarify that it has not expressed criticism of NUIG proposals, as suggested in the article”, Mike Jennings said.

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

The Higher Education system is like a first-class, high-performing car that is running out of petrol and requires an immediate injection of funding and resources, IFUT said today in a message to all political parties and candidates in the General Election.

IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, said that staff numbers in Higher Education are down well over 1,000 in two years while student numbers have increased by at least 10,000. In addition, state funding of the sector is down by 14.8% in the past two years alone: only Latvia has a worse record.

IFUT is not aligned to any political party but is urging its members to highlight the needs of the education system and to counteract misrepresentations of the people who work hard in the sector.

“IFUT will be pressing strongly for a commitment to adequate funding and facilities for Higher Education in the interests of our society and economy in any new Programme for Government following the General Election,” Mike Jennings said.

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

IFUT is also very pleased to see throughout the Report repeated acknowledgements of the current quality and high international reputation of Irish higher education. According to IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, “the statement in the Report that Irish higher education enjoys first place internationally for graduate employability and is placed second of 28 countries surveyed for graduate quality is particularly noteworthy”.

The Report says quite starkly that “the current system is delivering above-average outcomes at below-average funding levels”. The Report’s commitment to Quality Assurance is also welcome.

However, despite these welcome statements and the inclusion of a number of very welcome recommendations, IFUT’s overall assessment of the Report is that it is disappointing, often confused and, in general, a missed opportunity. The Report lacks a sense of authority and credibility. It often reads like a document compiled by people who do not understand the Irish higher education system and how it works.

The Report is uninspiring. It singularly lacks any specific indicators of how any of its recommendations might be implemented against the opposition of vested interests. With a change of government in prospect, it seems that Colin Hunt and his team may well have created one of our all-time most expensive dust accumulators.

The IFUT Media Release is available in full here.

The cases shown in the story, of a small number of very highly paid staff, confirm issues raised by IFUT in 2008: that there were undisclosed pay arrangements for small numbers of senior personnel in the universities. At the time, IFUT condemned the decision by the HEA not to disclose the details of exceptionally high salaries paid to certain senior personnel in six of the seven universities under its remit, a situation exposed by IFUT only through Freedom of Information legislation. IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings said: “Looking at the list at the top 100 earners, one cannot help but be struck by the almost total absence of frontline educators. The list is almost exclusively made up of administrators, bureaucrats and managers.

“Imagine the frustration that will be felt by Assistant Lecturers (starting salary €33 623) or College Lecturers (€48 306) at the allegation that they are ‘high flyers’.

“Such staff have already taken earnings cuts of approximately 20% while the numbers of students they teach has reached the highest levels in Irish history: up 15% in the past two years alone.

“Clearly, anyone who aspires to be rich should not be looking for a job in education”, Mike Jennings said.

The IFUT Press Release is available here.

A letter written to the newspaper by the General Secretary in response to the article was published two days later. The General Secretary’s letter is available on The Irish Times Website. A PDF version is also available here.

“I note that in a panic reaction to the prospect of more cuts, some university sources are allegedly considering redundancies for academic staff”, said Mike Jennings, General Secretary of IFUT.

“I wish to state categorically that under no circumstances will IFUT agree to any compulsory job losses in the university sector”, said Mr Jennings.

“At a time of unprecendented demand for higher education and at a time when we have record numbers of students in our universities, it beggars belief that the Department of Education could even be considering more cuts.”

IFUT has called on the Minister for Education, Ms Mary Coughlan TD, to issue an immediate statement denying these reports.

The IFUT Press Release is available here.