Phoenix: Civic pride

By way of clarification on last week’s column, everyone connected with this column and this paper supports the development of the North Quays with one caveat. That is that the development of the historic city cannot be ignored or long-fingered as it has been over the past few years. 

The North Quays is a critical brownfield site that must be redeveloped. That would best be done in a sequential manner rather than as a one-off enterprise. 

That’s probably the way things will happen anyway. 

Anyone who has been in Ferrybank over the past few months can see the huge amount of work that has been done. The new railway station is quite impressive now that it nears completion, even though it does not have glazing in its southern aspect overlooking the river. This is made up for by views from the entrance to the building. 

All we need now is for Harcourt Developments to press the start button on their proposed development.

Anyway, SETU president Prof Veronica Campbell was on local radio with Damien Tiernan last week giving an update on developments. She is an able communicator doing a difficult job in the face of intra-regional jealousies in the south east. 

The “door has been opened” to appointing new professors in the Tech Uni sector, according to the Minister for Further Education. It is unclear how many will be in SETU Waterford as all the talk is of the regional remit. 

Will new professors be supplied with drones so that they can hover over the region without committing to any single location? 

In any event, it’s about time that the anomaly of having a university without professors was finally ended. 

If government is serious about the mandate and remit of the Tech University sector then there has to be parity of esteem between the TU and legacy university sectors. In that context, people will have seen ads in national papers in recent weeks informing those with degrees from the Tech Uni sector and their predecessors in the Institute of Technology sector that they are now eligible to vote in national senate elections. 

Heretofore, only graduates of the National University (NUI) or Trinity College were, unfairly, eligible. Government deserves some credit for this sensible move. It was a long time coming.

Ms Campbell is bullish about new courses and student enrolment in Waterford. Enrolment for pharmacy and vet medicine courses commences in September 2026 although no new buildings for these courses have yet been provided. 

Minister John Cummins says funding is available to advance new buildings to the planning permission stage, which is good news, but then what? Another 20-year waiting for the go ahead? 

SETU recently published an excellent and positive report by Indecon Consultants on the value (which no one doubts) of SETU to Waterford and the south east. We should also have a report documenting the shameful lack of investment and capital development at WIT over the past two decades and its devastating impact on that institution and on Waterford city. 

Some sort of prioritisation of buildings for SETU Waterford should be put in place bearing in mind what happened here. The long struggle for a new engineering building is instructive. It is now being built on Browne’s Road, having first been proposed in 2006 and cancelled in 2011 by Fine Gael in government. 

The quid pro quo is that on completion, SETU must surrender its College Street campus to the Waterford Wexford ETB to help that organisation expand its presence in Waterford city. They have, quelle surprise, existed in ugly pre-fabs at the Waterford College of Further Education on Parnell Street for more than 20 years. 

As we start 2026, we remind our readers that five new campus buildings and a new management facility were built in Carlow Institute of Technology in the past 15 years of Fine Gael government, while not a brick was laid at WIT. The political priorities of FG in government and its strength in the Carlow/Kilkenny/Wexford “big” farming communities were evident.

Those who removed the name Waterford from the lexicon of third-level institutions should never be forgiven. 

Professor Campbell would surely understand this viewpoint. It was a mean-minded, petty, unnecessary thing to do as Dundalk has shown. That’s now Dundalk University College! 

Consider the University of California. It has 10 constituent campuses at UCLA (Los Angeles), UCB (Berkley) UCSD (San Diego) etc. and is an extremely well-regarded institution. Why should SETU Waterford not be officially known as SETUW? That would certainly redress the deep resentment at being cheated in the public naming of things. 

Waterford lobbied alone for nearly a century for university status in this region while other places sat on their hands. Committees were formed and politicians lobbied over that period and as far back as 1945 the prize was within reach. 

This paper reported at the time that the city’s mayor was confident of success. Only for the public intervention of the president of UCC, Alfie O’Rahilly, who was adamantly opposed to the proposal, our De La Salle College (now a second-level institution, but then a teacher training college) would have become a constituent college of the NUI. 

O’Rahilly was an advisor on university education to the Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid and sat on an informal committee from 1950 with the other presidents of the National University of Ireland; Michael Tierney of UCD, Monsignor Pádraig de Brún, Cardinal D'Alton, and Bishops Cornelius Lucey of Cork and Michael Browne of Galway. You can sense the opposition we faced.

More recent activism by the Waterford University Action Group saw WIT being created from Waterford Regional Technical College in the mid-1990s. The push for university status was relentless, but the opposition from the legacy university sector was as strong as ever despite it being clear that there would be massive expansion in third-level participation. 

WIT, which was professionally examined and publicly acknowledged as operating at university level, was politically and intellectually eviscerated post 2006. Restoring the word Waterford to the SETU title would go some way towards healing the damage done to our city’s civic reputation, pride and sense of its place in the Irish scheme of things.