THE expert committee advising the Minister for Education on the upgrading of regional technical colleges has recommended, in a draft final report, that all RTCs should be upgraded under a new degree-awarding Irish National Institute of Technology.
Ms Breathnach received the committee's final report last week and it will be published later today.
If the recommendations of the draft report, dated April 30th, are implemented, each RTC will be known by the title Irish National Institute of Technology followed by the name of the town where the college is situated, for example, INIT Cork or INIT Athlone.
The INIT's "ownership" by the redesignated RTCs would be "reflected in its composition and operation as well as in its legal basis", the draft report recommends. This means, among other things, that the INIT's board would be made up of representatives of the redesignated RTCs.
According to the draft report, INIT would take over from the National Council for Educational Awards as the national body awarding the colleges' degrees and other qualifications. It could also "devolve" that award-giving power to individual colleges or groups of colleges on the recommendation of an international review team.
The draft report's maintaining a "cohesive tech no-logical sector with its distinctive mission" as part of "one of two broad sectors of Irish higher education".
This belief in the importance of the third-level technological colleges remaining part of a coherent and unified structure, rather than splitting them into numerous autonomous colleges and universities on the British model, wash central to the work of the expert committee.
The committee, chaired by Prof Dervilla Donnelly of LTCD, was set up by the Minister in January after the row which followed her unilateral designation of Waterford RTC as an institute of technology. Staff and students at Cork, RTC, in particular, were outraged by the decision, organising marches and pickets to the Dail and Department of Education, and putting up a "Cork Institute of Technology" candidate in thee forthcoming election.
The expert group's draft report also recommends that the new Waterford Institute of Technology should eventually come under the proposed IN IT, but does not make clear the processes and time-scale to enable this to happen.
Mr Matty O'Callaghan, Cork RTC's student union president, yesterday said the report's recommendations would mean the "bigger colleges like Cork and Galway would be held back by smaller RTCs like Letterkenny and Carlow. We will be suffering because of their lack of development, despite the fact that we have academic structures and student services equal to universities".