Of course the dust will settle over the past few days, and normal business will resume. But when that happens, we will need to know how to plan for a future for higher education that is sustainable and that delivers acceptable quality. Right now it seems to me that the government parties have entered into a commitment – i.e. the commitment not to introduce higher education tuition fees – that is really about protecting people from a cost, but they have not considered what that will mean for the higher education sector and how it can remain viable.

This was brought home to me strongly in listening to both John Gormley (Leader of the Greens) and Mary Hanafin (Fianna Fail, and former Minister for Education) on RTE’s This Week today (you can hear the interviews here). John Gormley described his party as the ‘party of education’, and stated that the country needed to ‘invest in education’ – but from the uncertain nature of his answers it became clear that he had given no thought whatsoever to the implications for higher education of the removal of fees as an option and that he had no formed opinions as to how the sector might be funded. Curiously he implied that the universities might lessen the impact of the decision by raising the registration charge, though he hoped they wouldn’t.

Of course before yesterday none of us knew whether the government would drop the ‘free fees’ scheme. But we understood that as part of the discussion about the future national strategy for higher education the option of including student contributions to the cost of education was being considered. The revised programme for government has resulted in this option being removed from the table. John Gormley’s emphasis on the need to ‘invest’ in education might suggest that increased funding will be considered as an option, but we all know it won’t. Realistically the government really couldn’t do that, the national finances won’t allow it. But in any case, we know that higher education is always an early casualty of national budgetary problems, and as a result the state has been an increasingly unreliable funder, combining funding reductions with a desire to impose ever greater controls. This is not unique to the current government and the parties that make up the coalition: I recall the Fine Gael/Labour coalition of the 1980s doing exactly the same thing.

What we have is a political system that claims to want world class higher education but which is prepared to do very little to help bring that about. Only in developing a programme for high value research have politicians in recent times shown some imagination and innovation. But even that imposed pressures on the system because the full costs of research were never wholly met.

And now, as part of an attempt to justify budget reductions, we are subjected to criticism and innuendo that suggests that we are wasting resources and perpetuating inefficiencies, and that only government control can improve this. We are a sector in peril. This will be the time for the university sector to show decisive and strong leadership, not just in our interests but in the interests of the country and future generations. Higher education quality, on which our economic prospects depend, is easily destroyed and only very laboriously restored over a lengthy period of time. Let us hope we don’t now produce the evidence for that proposition.