NUI Galway has attracted investments worth €100 million for its research programmes, it was announced yesterday. John Downes reports.
The college president, Dr Iognáid Ó Muircheartaigh, said NUI is willing to compete for further research funding with other universities.
At a briefing to mark the first anniversary of the launch of the university's five-year strategic plan, Dr Ó Muircheartaigh said the college has ambitious plans to develop a €35 million sports and cultural centre and to increase its efforts to attract overseas students.
"We are very committed to broad-based research," he said. "But a university without students is nonsense. The second thing is research. We owe it to our students to be a leader in research."
The university aims to introduce a number of initiatives to improve student life on campus, he said.
This will include its planned sports and cultural centre and the development of a new entrance to the university.
It would also be developing programmes to attract high-quality Irish and international students.
While it had already raised some €25 million to develop its new engineering facility, it was seeking a further €30 million for the project, he said. It also hoped to complete a new €16 million business school and new nursing, health and social sciences building by September 2005.
The need to attract lucrative overseas students to the university was in part driven by the requirement from the Government for universities to diversify their sources of funding, he said.
However, Dr Ó Muircheartaigh said he also believed that such students helped to increase the cultural diversity of any university.
While approximately 5 per cent of NUI Galway's current student population come from overseas, the aim would be to raise this to 10 per cent, he said.
Dr Ó Muircheartaigh said he believed this was a very critical time for university education in Ireland.
He expressed his hope that the issue of university funding was moving towards a partnership between the Government and universities, rather than a "us against them" approach.
However, he believed the privatisation of Irish universities could lead to "gross inequities" in the Irish university system.
NUI Galway's instinct was that it was very much against such a proposal, particularly if it were to lead to a situation where students could buy their way into college.