Higher Education Authority Bill 2022: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2022-07-06
============================================================

Aisling Dolan (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach

I appreciate Senator Mullen’s concerns about academic freedom. It is crucial and a cornerstone of our democracy. The Senator is an advocate for the freedoms we need to protect and guarantee in many countries around the world. Ireland is, I hope, a great advocate for that through its participation in international organisations.
We acknowledge that academic freedom, which is addressed in section 120, is a crucial part of the Bill. It is important that the academic freedom of all our institutions has been enshrined here in the Bill before us. It is important, as Senator Mullen mentioned, and I feel it is present in the Bill as well, that academic freedom is for all the higher education institutions, and that encompasses both students and staff. The Minister may wish to comment on that. That is a cornerstone of what we want to achieve in the Bill. We want to ensure academic freedom will be part of everything our third level higher education institutions are funded for through the HEA.

---

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/seanad/2022-07-06/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-07-06