GMIT teachers call for core funding to be restored

Emergency meeting of TUI members held

Áine Ryan

GOVERNMENT must urgently restore core funding and agree a five-year investment strategy to ensure GMIT (Galway Mayo Institute of Technology) is in a position to enhance its regional and rural provision as a multi-campus. Otherwise the TUI (Teachers Union of Ireland) will ask their many members working at the campuses to ballot for strike action.
An emergency meeting held last week called on Minister for Education and Skills, Richard Bruton, to immediately restore the €2million budget cut of 2014-2015. This cut adds to a 40 percent core funding cut between 2008 and 2014.
A TUI statement confirmed that almost 100 members of the GMIT branch met at the Galway campus on Wednesday last, with video links to the Castlebar and Letterfrack campuses. At the meeting members expressed ‘grave concerns’ about an ‘all staff’ communication issued on April 28 by GMIT proposing to reduce the staff levels by 22 in the current academic year.
Members were very critical of the lack of consultation and passed a motion to ballot for industrial action if the institute does not agree ‘to engage in meaningful consultation and negotiation with the union’.

Industrial relations
“Matters like this should not be sprung on members out of the blue. There are established industrial relations procedures for processing issues of concern. It is unacceptable that the institute has not as of yet provided the union with the information requested. The institute is aware our members are protected against compulsory redundancy under the terms of a collective agreement,” said Dr Aidan Kenny, Assistant General Secretary of TUI.
The union says that institutes, such as GMIT, are the skills and knowledge hubs for regional jobs growth and economic development.
When contacted yesterday, GMIT declined to comment on the matter, referring The Mayo News to the union.
However, the spokeswoman did confirm that ‘GMIT met this week to discuss its financial projections to 2020’.  
“A Revised Compact Agreement was submitted to the HEA in March,” the spokeswoman said.
Earlier this year GMIT was among three IoTs (Institutes of Technology) advised by the HEA (Higher Education Authority) that it would be penalised and lose State funding if it did not address key efficiencies. It was warned it would lose the largest potential sum of money to be withheld (€475,000), followed by Dundalk Institute of Technology (€320,000) and the National College of Art and Design (€214,000). It was the first time higher education institutions faced penalties for not meeting agreed targets, based on new performance measures introduced by the HEA. At the time, officials confirmed these penalties could be avoided by submitting plans to address the identified shortcomings.

Reaction
CAMPAIGNER, Paddy McGuinness, who led the 18-year drive to open a Castlebar campus, said yesterday (Monday) that the new Government needed to be cognisant of the fact that ‘so many Independents were elected because regional and rural Ireland had been overlooked’.
“The Castlebar campus [of GMIT] was set up despite the establishment and they need to acknowledge now that this institution must be properly resourced as it is the seedbed for the regeneration of rural Ireland,” Mr McGuinness told The Mayo News yesterday.
He continued: “I fear that there is an attitude in some quarters that if they neglect it enough it will be closed. I am personally not convinced of the main Galway campus’s commitment to the Castlebar campus and believe it is low on the priorities list of GMIT.”