Sir, – The news of the sudden closure of TalkTalk’s base in Waterford City follows job losses at ABB, Bausch Lomb, Teva and Waterford Crystal over the past two years. These headline disasters amount to about 1,800 jobs, plus employment also lost among local suppliers and services. The country’s fifth largest city is facing a full-scale crisis of de-industrialisation. Each time we hear the same refrain: excellent workforce but, sorry, cheap competition, global restructuring.
There is one simple and overdue step that the Government can take at once. It must re-designate Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) as Ireland’s eighth university. Wales, with three million people, has 10 universities; Scotland, with a population of 5.2 million, has just gained its 16th. The University of the Highlands and Islands has been built upon 13 local colleges over the past decade, and mentored by several of Scotland’s established universities. At its formal launch on August 25th, the chairman of its governing body described the project as “the key institution in the regeneration of the Highlands and Islands throughout the 21st century”.
University of the Highlands and Islands’ coverage of the northern half of Scotland means that Ireland’s south-east is now the largest region by area and population in Ireland and Britain without its own regional university. In a blatantly contemptuous Dáil statement in March, the new Minister for Education and Dublin TD, Ruairí Quinn, used the economic meltdown as a pretext for rejecting WIT’s well-established claim by international standards for full university status. Nonsense. Cork and Galway were planned in 1845 and opened their doors in 1849, not the happiest days for Ireland.
My own university, Cambridge, struggled into life during the reign of King John. When times are bad, we should build for the future. If the University of Waterford and Ireland South East (WISE) must start without any new money, so be it. Right now, the new institution can be tasked with raising its own funding. It can build on the Tiger investment that has created one of the most modern campuses in the country, and lay the foundations of programmes that will be sustained by State funding when better times eventually return.
What Waterford needs, and what Waterford deserves, is a regional driver that can give hope for the future. On Day One, the University will look very much the existing IT, but upgrade the status, change the governance and broaden the mandate, and gradually, as in other such promotions, WISE will grow out WIT.
The cost involved right now merely involves changing the notepaper and the noticeboards, but the planning can begin. If the Dublin mentality still cannot grasp the force of the jobs earthquake in Waterford, then kindly erect a sign on the northbound lane of the M9 appealing to the last person leaving the city to turn out the lights. – Yours, etc,
