Cutting back on

AS A THIRD LEVEL lecturer with occasional duties to care for some students who need a little boost in their access to education, I have been fortunate to draw down funding under the Strategic Innovation Fund from the Irish Minister for Education. We used a few hundred euro every month from that fund to pay for minibus transport from parts of southeast Ireland with no scheduled public transport. We used twice-monthly bus services to attend Irish OpenCoffee sessions in Limerick and to visit Cork enterprise centres in conjunction with Glucksman Gallery visits. There is no other way–besides minibus services from Tipperary townlands–that we could have done these day trips. The Strategic Innovation Fund is not to be used for these day trips anymore because the fund itself is being throttled back at a national level. I suspect that this will prevent creative multimedia students at Tipperary Institute from attending OpenCoffee sessions during the next two academic years. These students' understanding of Ireland’s start-up culture will suffer. Their opportunity to pitch themselves as prospective employees will have to wait for job fairs and recruiter visits. We will also lose the invaluable opportunity to interview entrepreneurs for our podcasts and will no longer deploy to record video promos for new companies operating in four enterprise centres throughout southeast Ireland.

Thankfully, we can listen to all the chatter remotely on Twitter and Jaiku.

Sean Flynn – “University presidents angry at latest cuts” in the Home News section of The Irish Times, 3 October 2008.