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INTERVIEW

(Photo of Tom Boland)

"What Chuck Feeney’s money did was to change the whole system. Without it, it’s unlikely that the Government at that time would have initiated the programme for investment in higher education."

FUNDING EXCELLENCE

HEA Chief Executive Tom Boland sees a role for private money driving excellence in Irish education. He talks to Trinity Today about how philanthropy and the Irish Government can partner to do great things for universities.

If talk of cutbacks has stifled the drive in Ireland’s public sector, nobody told Tom Boland, Chief Executive of the Higher Education Authority (HEA). “At the undergraduate level we have ambitions to be at the front rank of OECD higher education systems. That means participation rates in the order of 70 per cent. That is something in the order of 30,000 additional students in the system. And that,” he emphasises, “means a lot of money.”

Boland is realistic about the prospect of securing everything the Irish education system needs, and admits to a lack of “any special insight which can manage to wrest money from the Department of Finance.” He also admits, with unusual frankness, to a growing financial crunch in the Irish university sectors: “Budgets are very tight in universities,” says Boland. “I’m not at all convinced that government alone can carry that responsibility.”

The HEA chief is talkative – and convincing – about the ways in which both public and private resources can partner together to achieve great things in education.

Chuck Feeney may be an obvious example to cite, but Boland is better qualified than most to talk of the Feeney factor: he saw it first hand as legal adviser from 1996 to 2006 to a Department of Education which, he says, had been transformed by generosity. “With philanthropy you normally give money for a particular project and the particular project gets done. What Chuck Feeney’s money did was to change the whole system. Without it, it’s unlikely that the Irish Government at that time would have initiated the programme for investment in higher education, and it’s unlikely therefore that we would be as far along the road in developing an innovation society. So, by making that commitment at that particular time, Chuck Feeney and Atlantic Philanthropies changed a whole system. And that’s such a great example of what philanthropy can do.”

“It was wonderful that Martin Naughton went so public in relation to the CRANN building,” a joint endeavour between Trinity College, Naughton and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to build a centre for science and technology on the TCD campus. “His reasoning,” adds Boland, “was superb: he wanted other philanthropists to know that giving like this can help transform institutions.”

Trinity College is home to a number of other projects funded by private money which have proved inspirational, and Boland is quick to note them too: “Peter Sutherland has funded the Institute for International Integration Studies, Denis O’Brien has funded the National Institute for Intellectual Disabilities, and Bernard McNamara has supported Trinity’s School of Engineering.”

While giving credit to the private philanthropists, Boland believes that the public sector can do a great deal to support them. In a recent report, the HEA has lobbied for a more supportive environment for philanthropy from the State, advocating lighter restrictions on the levels and types of gifts people can give to institutions. “The Commission for Taxation,” he says, “will hopefully take up some of those issues in their deliberations at the moment.”

Finally, Boland places considerable onus on individual institutions to raise money from both large-scale philanthropists and more moderately successful graduates: (Continued on page 13...)