The Irish financial crisis through the period between 2008 and 2012 caused unprecedented damage to the national economy while generating substantial inequality and demographic issues through the austerity measures that followed. While large amounts of taxation has gone towards understanding the...

As student numbers in the Irish higher education system continue to grow, the escalating funding crisis within the system needs to be urgently addressed. This conversation must also consider the dynamic relationships and funding limitations possessed by a range of system stakeholders including...

The ICL model as outlined in current policy discussions cannot work in Ireland due to the high probability of default. The Irish system is neither small enough or large enough to make an ICL work. As it stands in any ICL scenario a minimum of 10 years of losses would have to be absorbed by the...

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of the funding mechanisms for higher education across sixteen countries which builds upon existing work on educational institutions, educational outcomes and welfare regimes. We focus upon the current financing dilemma within the Irish higher education...

Sustainability in the public finances. This was the mantra of the IMF-ECB-EC Troika bailout. How was sustainability achieved? Mainly by changing aspects of the budgetary process. Ireland was required to submit the entirety of its budgetary framework for external scrutiny by the Troika and...

The role of universities has expanded to include being a driver of innovation. We suggest that any such body so charged is perhaps best suited to achieve this if it itself is innovative. We review the literature on corporate innovation, discuss a recent metric of innovative culture and present...

In a time when there are only limited funding and staffing but ever-increasing enrollments of students, to assess the efficiency of universities becomes a crucial task, which itself is vital for effective allocation and utilisation of educational resources. The main aim of this paper is to...

We present a review of the Irish banking collapse, detailing its origins in a confluence of events. We suggest that the very concentrated nature of the Irish banking sector which will emerge from the policy decisions taken as a consequence of the collapse runs a risk of a second crisis. We...

We provide, for the first time, a disaggregated input output table for Irish higher education. Using this we constructed type I and type II multipliers for gross output. We find that Irish higher education institutions have high, but explicable, Type II multipliers. Taking account of the...

We present the results of a survey of Irish higher education staff, the aim of which was to ascertain a broad picture of the nature and extent of their engagement with various stakeholders. Contrary to the stereotype of academics living in 'ivory towers' and not being engaged with 'the real...