The Higher Education Equality Unit (HEEU) was set up by the HEA in 1992 to promote greater equality in higher education institutions for both students and staff. While the unit has been responsible for highlighting a range of issues relating to equality, there is a sense in which it is preaching to the converted.
The HEEU lacks teeth. How to get its recommendations adopted by senior management at third level is a significant problem.
"Through our conferences and seminars we develop recommendations," explains Eamon Tuffy, chairperson of the HEEU. "We send them to the HEA and to the institutions, but we need to find a way of progressing these recommendations. We're working to keep all aspects of the equality issue on the agenda at the one time."
The HEEU is currently preparing a set of recommendations on ethnicity. Among them is a recommendation that asylum seekers, who have been resident in Ireland for six months, be given the same rights on relation to fees and grants as Irish students. Staff training on racism and cultural diversity is also on the agenda as is a suggestion that the HEA produces guidelines on anti-discrimination policies for third level.
Tuffy highlights the fact that out of a total population of 24,000 Travellers in the State, only five Traveller students are at third-level.
The RTC Equality Network, meanwhile, which involves the ITs in Athlone, Carlow, Cork, Galway, Tallaght and Tralee, was set up in 1996 with EU funding to disseminate models of good practice and to examine the changing culture within the RTC sector.
Although EU funding has now ceased, the network continues, according to Marise Bermingham, director of the Educational Opportunities Centre at Cork IT. "We have launched an equal opportunities awareness campaign in Cork IT and we are in the act of forming an equal opportunities forum," she says. "The senior management is very supportive. Similar initiatives are being developed in other colleges. All colleges are actively looking at equal opportunities issues but we are in a development stage," she notes.
