President calls on students to innovate

THE ACTIVE and critical participation of young people in Irish life during economic and social upheaval can help generate hope and the evolution of society, President Michael D Higgins has said.

In an address to the Union of Students in Ireland’s annual congress in Ballinasloe, Co Galway, yesterday, Mr Higgins said individualism, a lack of tolerance for dissenting voices, critique or radical thinking had served the State poorly during the Celtic Tiger era.

He said the debate on where Ireland was now going needed contributions from a strong and independent student voice that was representative of the future.

“We need now, more than ever, a vibrant, imaginative and creative population to rebuild our land, to build a real Republic,” he told some 300 delegates at the congress. “Each of you are creators and innovators and have it within you to shape the Ireland of tomorrow.”

Mr Higgins also appeared critical of third-level institutions for focusing on the business side of education and international ranking tables rather than teaching and listening to students.

“What kind of a scholastic institution or community of learning is it when you hire a very important person who can bring investment to a university but doesn’t want to teach the main body of undergraduate students?

“What kind of lack of nerve does it reveal when, instead of addressing issues that are in front of your face, you decide to start comparing yourself to English-language-speaking universities all over the world and simply say the same as you would, for example as Rory McIlroy is number one or two in the world in relation to golf, where is our university in the international rankings?”

Third-level institutions would, he said, have opportunities to lead Ireland into a new engagement with our current circumstances, and “students have a critical role to play in developing that new discourse”.

“The current paradigm in economics, I suggest, drawn from the fiction of rational markets, needs to be replaced by a scholarship that is genuinely emancipatory, genuinely original, that restores the unity between the sciences and culture, unleashing rather than squashing human curiosity, discovery and celebratory impulses,” he added.

Mr Higgins also called on student leaders and the wider public to work together to combat “pernicious racism and homophobia” which he said were wreaking havoc in the lives of many young people.

He said the people of Ireland needed to look inwards and ask how problems such as racism, isolation and loneliness had managed to gain a foothold in society and become a reality in the lives of many.

Mr Higgins acknowledged that students were facing uncertain and challenging times but said that it was from such scenarios that opportunity often presented itself.

“The exciting people, the genuinely original people, innovative people are those who are able to draw the different sources of knowledge and wonderment together.”