The largest union of post-secondary teachers in Ireland is urging the government to reject the recommendations of an OECD review of the country’s tertiary education system.

The OECD report, presented to the Irish government late last year, calls for sweeping reforms to the country’s higher education system, including the reintroduction of tuition fees, a greater emphasis on the commercialization of research, and a weakening of the tenure system.

At a conference held in Dublin last month, the Teachers Union of Ireland sharply criticized the OECD report as "profoundly unsuited to the conditions of Irish society."

"An underlying principal of the OECD report is that higher education should operate and be managed according to commercial imperatives," said union president Paddy Healy. "We trenchantly oppose any dilution of the core ethic of education as a social good and insist that there must be no erosion of tenure among staff or of academic freedom."

He also flatly rejected the recommendation that tuition fees, abolished by the Irish government in the 1980s, be reestablished. "It is simply untrue that the abolition of fees has failed as a policy. In fact, it has been a resounding success. It is the paucity of resources that remains a factor in the failure to attract more learners from non traditional backgrounds."

CAUT’s associate executive director David Robinson — one of two international speakers invited to the conference — warned that adopting many of the OECD’s recommendations could potentially open up Ireland’s tertiary education system to the rules of international trade agreements, like the General Agreement on Trade in Services.

"Ireland has already taken commitments in the GATS for private education services," Robinson said. "While this would seem to exclude public education, the danger is that by further blurring the distinction between public and private, the OECD recommendations could lead to an interpretation that Irish higher education institutions are in fact covered by GATS. That could lock-in and intensify the pressures of privatization and commercialization."

In response to Robinson’s concerns, the union has asked the government to assess the potential impact under international trade agreements of any future changes to Irish higher education.