Madam, – On April 18th, 1967, the then minister for education, Donough O’Malley, without any advance notice or debate, announced the government’s cabinet decision to dissolve the National University of Ireland and to merge Trinity and UCD, “to remove” he said, “the insidious partition which divides our capital city”.
No statement could have united the academic communities of the two universities more than that one, where we combined, with the support of the newly formed Irish Federation of University Teachers, (IFUT), to reject that decision. We succeeded. The famous merger never took place.
Now we have the announcement by the current Minister for Education, Batt O’Keeffe, without any advance notice or debate, that the National University of Ireland is to be dissolved. One wonders if that is a considered Government Cabinet decision? In any event, I would hope that the academic communities and graduates of the universities of the NUI will once more reject that decision and say No to the Government.
It is an ill-considered and wrong decision, making neither fiscal nor academic sense, and should go the way of the O’Malley decision of 43 years ago. – Yours, etc,