Peter O'Dwyer

And I think that probably is true that those critical thinking skills are coming more to the fore again.

So there's two elements to the funding discussion I thought were interesting.

On the one hand, I don't doubt that it is underfunded.

And as you said, in 2022, the government came out and said as much.

If you look at the funding to the Department of Further and Higher Education, which doesn't all go to third-level universities, obviously, to the seven that we're talking about, figures I could find were 2021, 3.3 billion was the allocation in that budget.

2026, just shy of 5 billion.

That's pretty rapid increase in funding.

Now, as I say, it's not all going to those that Paul represents.

But when, as again, he brought up in the interview, we write a lot of the business posts about runaway public spending.

that strikes me as a pace of increase that isn't really sustainable.

So it might just be about how we make that money work a bit more smartly, because as he says, it's a relatively small shortfall in comparison to other things that they've identified year on year, 240, 250 million.

I thought the second interesting thing was he raised the fuel protests.

If we could find 700 and odd million for the fuel protests,

whereas the 240 or 250 for universities.

Yeah.

So I think two things can be true there, but you would just want to be wary about the overall...

envelope that's going to that department i mean like have we seen a step change across all of that department in the five years that their funding has gone up that much yeah maybe that i'm unaware of but i don't think so and just on the lobbying front i thought it was interesting we all knew that lobby groups would point towards the fuel protest before long the universities weren't the first one that came to mind but if they're doing it you can be pretty sure it's going to come up a lot in the remainder of the year

Yeah, I mean, he says at one point, the job was go in and basically say, this is what I've been told to say.

And then almost the kind of off record or without prejudice to my stated position.

Here's what I really think.