SEANAD:A PAPER dealing with universities and the points system – to be detailed at a conference on the Leaving Certificate/CAO system, in UCD today – should carry a health warning pointing out that it represented what seven people had decided, "not the rest of us in a collegiate community", Seán Barrett (Ind) said.
He said the Oireachtas should be aware of the tendency of these people to rush out statements without consulting. Under the Universities Act, the universities were collegiate and not managerial bodies.
The points system had been set up by a previous provost of TCD who believed that any alternative system had to be looked at askance owing to the prevalence of the use of influence.
The heads had boasted, several years ago, in pursuit of a 72 per cent pay rise, that they were no longer educators but corporate chief executives, he added.
Jim Darcy (FG) said he had great respect for Dr Tom Collins, the chairman of the group that had drawn up the paper. “You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it every day and you don’t teach students by teaching to the exams.”
He urged that the Minister for Education ban exam papers, as a teaching tool, from secondary school classrooms at fifth-year level and for the first term of sixth year.
A Minister of another government, Conor Murphy of Sinn Féin, seemed to have over-stepped the mark in saying that the Republic should change its Constitution, Jimmy Harte (Lab) said.
He was responding to a suggestion by Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (SF) that it might be timely to debate political reform in the context of the presidential election and an all-island dimension.
The Government had seen fit to appoint Martin McAleese to the Seanad, but if he was living in his home town of Belfast, he would not be allowed to vote for the next president, Mr Ó Clochartaigh said.
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