Third Level Education Dail Éireann — 2024-10-08 ============================================================ David Stanton (FG), Cork East I thank the Minister of State for telling us about the good work that is going on and the money being made available. Does he accept the finding by the Irish Universities Association in an investigation it launched recently that one third of the equipment in Irish universities is older than the original iPhone, that is, more than 16 years old, and more than half of it is over a decade old? Does he agree that this limits universities' ability to compete at the leading edge in domains of research that rely on such equipment to build in the areas of most current relevance to industry and to attract the best researchers and support them to succeed? How much would be required to bring all our third level institutions up to the required modern standard? Does the Minister of State agree that having equipment that is more than 16 years old, making it out of date, is not good enough and is putting us at a really poor competitive advantage relative to our competitors? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-10-08/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:19+00:00 Sitting date: 2024-10-08