Abstract
Over the past 20 years, access has moved from the margins to centre stage in higher education (HE) in the Republic of Ireland. We have seen a steady stream of policy statements and reviews on the topic of access from the state and the Higher Education Authority (the body which directs and funds the sector), a growing body of research on widening participation (WP) and on a more local level the mushrooming of access programmes in universities and in community and further education.
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Notes
- 1.
Academic research on HE in Ireland is a developing field, but there is a relatively limited number of book length studies on Irish HE in general. For a very thorough overview, see Clancy (2015a) and for a range of recent significant critical assessments of history, practices and pedagogy, see Loxley et al. (2014) and for a sharp polemic on the direction HE has taken, see Gallagher (2012) and for a major empirical study of management and governance, see Lynch et al. (2012) and also O’Malley (2012).
- 2.
It is useful to note that Ireland, in comparison to other OECD countries, Ireland has one of the highest volumes of foreign direct investment (FDI). In 2013 (latest data), this was worth $38,329 million or 23 percent of that of the US ($166,411 million), the largest recipient of FDI. It is also useful to compare Ireland with France $25,904 million or Norway $16,665 million or Finland $3,393 million or the UK $45,945 million to get a sense of just how large the Irish economy is in terms of FDI (OECD 2014, p. 14). The collection of Irish industries labelled by the OECD as “services” was worth in terms of FDI $269,372 million in 2012 (in 2008 = $137,463 million) in comparison to “manufacturing” which was $68,876 million. However, we need to be careful not to get too ecstatic about these headline numbers due to the way in which Ireland is used as a “revenue clearing house” for many multinationals.
- 3.
There is considerable dispute over the organisation of the state and market in Irish society (Allen 2007; Kirby 2002; O’Riain 2000). The most salient point to the present discussion is that despite the rhetoric of neoliberal ideologues it is not so much the rolling back of the state that has taken place but a distinctive shift in the political cultural logic which guides decision making and the specific arrangement of power between the state, the market and the transitional bodies (Crouch 2011; Harvey 2005).
- 4.
This project was the outcome of a conference held in Parma (1992) under the auspices of the Council of Europe’s “Higher Education and Research Committee” and covered 44 countries.
- 5.
This is a set of interlocking state and non-state agencies which exhibit varying degrees of autonomy which are held together with varying degrees of tightness and looseness via regulatory frameworks, negotiated arrangements, legal coercion and so on.
- 6.
Alheit’s focus is on adult education in this article but the analysis holds for post compulsory education as a whole.
- 7.
Gorard’s et al. (2006) review for the UK’s Higher Education Funding Council identified 1,200 papers (including empirical and non-empirical work, reports, evaluations) between 1997 and 2005 covering mainly the UK. Our cursory search of the ERIC database for just peer reviewed articles using the terms “access” and “higher education” generated roughly 3,000 papers (published between 1972 and 2015). Narrowing it to (the more recent term) “widening participation” and “higher education” produced 308 results for the period 1999–2015.
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Fleming, T., Loxley, A., Finnegan, F. (2017). Introduction. In: Access and Participation in Irish Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56974-5_1
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