THE ABOLITION of third-level fees and the introduction of free medical cards to people aged over 70 had been socially regressive steps that had subsidised the affluent at the expense of the deprived, Dr Brian Maurer, medical director of the Irish Heart Foundation, said in his opening address to the Merriman Summer School in Ennis last night.
He said the unintended consequence of free fees, in an era of low taxation, was that universities had been deprived of the possibility of raising sufficient funds to provide a world-class educational service.
The worst consequence was that the socially disadvantaged were even less likely than before to avail of third-level education, he said.
"One has only to advert to the extraordinarily low ratio of university teachers to undergraduates, to the way in which our academic institutions have been compelled to go into the market place to raise funds, to the subversion of the pursuit of knowledge to commercial interests and the funding of so-called research, and to the need to make places available to fee-paying students from other countries to realise the damage that has been caused."
He added that free medical cards for those over 70 had provided the most affluent with free medical care at the expense of those who were least well-off, including those below the poverty line.
Dr Maurer paid tribute to the late president Patrick Hillery, who, he said, as vice-president of the European Commission, had spearheaded a visionary social programme that included directives introducing equal pay and equal opportunities for men and women.
"Equality of opportunity is essential, but equality of achievement is impossible and equality of reward is undesirable. Having said that, inequality of opportunity still exists, including in my own profession."
David Fitzpatrick, professor of modern history at Trinity College Dublin, gave a talk on "Politics and Irish Life Revisited", a reference to his noted book Politics and Irish Life 1913-1921,published in 1977.
He said that the release of many official archives "of both rival administrations" since the late 1970s had greatly expanded the material for local revolutionary studies, and a number of private archives had also emerged in recent years.
"Writing today, I would probably pay much greater attention to discourse and the retrospective construction of events, and therefore less attention to actual lived experience. The results might be a better book [but] utterly unreadable," Prof Fitzpatrick said.