Senator Gerard Craughwell- speech from 6 Jul 2022

I support Senator Higgins with respect to amendment 6 in relation to student union means a student union or other student representative body recognised by the higher education institute or the minister. Right now in another area I'm involved with a representative group whom the minister in question and the organisation in question have decided they don't want to recognise them, yet they were elected by a group within the organisation and this is why amendment 8 is the important one and I agree with Senator Norris here, amendment 8 is extremely important. I don't see how a minister or an institution can ignore a group that was elected by the membership of the student body and I would have huge difficulty if that is in any way enshrined in the legislation And those two lines enshrine it in the legislation that the minister or the higher education provider can turn around and say simply, no, we don't recognise you. Indeed, as a trade union representative myself, I recall sitting in front of a chief executive officer of a VEC at the time and I went in to make some representations and he looked at me and he said, I don't recognise the union. Right? And we had a long debate and discussion on it. And as Senator Higgins has said, many trade unions have tried to set themselves up in some of the larger companies in this country, some that fly aeroplanes, for example, and the organisation has decided that they don't want to recognise them. So, from that point of view, I am supporting both amendment 6 and amendment 8. The amendment that referred to priority groups, I have a bit of difficulty with the term priority groups because if you make one group a priority, you make another group less of a priority and that for me, I would have a difficulty with. On the issue of precarious employment, one of the most disgusting latent aspects of legislation from Europe was the establishment of employment by the hour in academic institutions, in schools and colleges. When you see highly qualified people being employed on a couple of hours a week, it is just repugnant to any sort of commitment to the organisation. And that then kicks into academic freedom, where a lecturer might take a particular view in the programme that he or she is delivering and the academic institution or the dean of the faculty decides, no, I don't like that. And you come up to renew your contract, whatever happened to the permanent full-time job, I would love to know what happened to that, because it is, for me, I find it the most difficult thing I have encountered it, funnily enough, I was employed in teaching in 1995, I went straight into a permanent job with full hours. Less than two years later, colleagues were employed on a couple of hours a week, I remember writing to the Minister for Social Protection saying that a teacher or a lecturer who was lecturing one hour a day was not earning any sort of an income and yet they were not entitled to any sort of welfare because they were working five days a week. What is more, a lot of them were required to sit in the staff room in case additional hours came up, and this happened in institutes of technology, now technological universities, as much as it happened in second level schools. So, I do not know what happened that employment in education has become so precarious. I do know that in my final year in the TUI, we did negotiate a change to the contract of indefinite duration from four years to two, and that was a remarkable achievement, I think, at the time, and both the department and the unions came together on that. But the precarious employment, if you want the best academic people driving your academic institutions to the highest levels internationally, then you have to give them employment, which guarantees their income, the home loan that Senator Higgins was talking about, the ability to buy a car, the ability to live a life, the ability to live a life as a young person, and not wait until you're a decrepit old so-and-so like me before you have enough money to live on. And that's simply just not good enough. So, I'd ask you to take Senator Higgins' amendments on board. Thank you very much.