Technological Universities
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11
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James Lawless (FF), Kildare North

For clarity, I will provide a short recap of the historical position. The original institutes of technology, IoTs, did not have professorial grades. They were amalgamated, largely, to form the technological universities we have now. Within the IoTs, the comparative grade was senior lecturer 3. The scales, grades, bands and job titles did not innately map onto the universities'. In some cases, the legacy job titles, conditions and work programmes did not map either. For example, they did not necessarily work over the summer. In a traditional university, a research professor would have a body of work over the summer months. In an IoT, a senior lecturer would typically finish up at the end of the academic term in May and not return until maybe late September. That is a significant difference. It is not just about giving them a new title, but about looking at their work output, the programmes they take on, enterprise engagement and the leadership role they play in the academic sector and that they are more than capable of playing, but it has to be reflected. That is part of this programme of transition as well.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-11