Welcome to the Republic of Higher Education, that wondrous archipelago of gleaming glass buildings and tumescent salaries, where Ireland’s brightest minds convene to forge the future—mostly of their own expense accounts.
If you ever doubted that Irish academia was rotten to the core, you’ve clearly not been paying attention to the daily comedic matinée. For years, universities have generously provided the nation with scandal after scandal, each more ludicrous than the last.
In a spectacle that perfectly captured the intellectual adolescence festering in Irish academia, the UCC Fruit-bat Fellatio Controversy revealed that even tenured scholars can behave like shrieking schoolchildren when confronted with the ordinary facts of the natural world. What began as the sharing of a peer-reviewed zoological article—something any grown professional might have glanced at with mild curiosity—degenerated into a shrill tantrum worthy of a parish gossip column. That a university, supposedly a bastion of reason, could brandish accusations of sexual harassment over the mention of fruit bats engaging in oral sex only confirmed what many suspected: beneath the gowns, Tudor Bonnets and lofty mission statements, these institutions are riddled with petty, puritanical minds incapable of distinguishing scientific discussion from adolescent embarrassment. Find out more…
Universities love to trumpet their expertise in due diligence, droning on in lecture halls about risk assessment, valuation protocols, and fiduciary responsibility as if these were sacred rites only they could properly administer. Yet when it comes to practicing what they so piously preach, their own leaders display the financial acumen of a half-trained shoplifter. Nowhere has this grotesque hypocrisy been more vividly exposed than at the University of Limerick, where the supposed custodians of public trust splurged millions on overpriced houses without bothering with even the most rudimentary market checks. They managed to pay vastly above value—sometimes double—while ignoring planning laws and sidestepping their own governance rules. If this is the calibre of due diligence in Irish academia, then students would be better off learning from a dog-eared pamphlet than any overpaid professor who can’t tell a prudent investment from an act of reckless idiocy. Find out more…
NUI Galway likes to wrap itself in the noble banners of equality and human rights, solemnly assuring students that it is the enlightened vanguard of social justice. Yet, when tested by the most basic principle—don’t discriminate against your own staff—it failed spectacularly. This is the same institution that stuffed its prospectuses with pious waffle about gender parity while being found guilty in the courts of brazenly sexist discrimination against female lecturers. Having been publicly shamed, the university did what any flailing bureaucracy does best: it threw tens of thousands of euro—public money, naturally—at an army of glossy consultants to explain the rudimentary concept of treating employees fairly. It’s almost impressive how an organisation that claims to teach equality law needed to pay outsiders to reintroduce them to the ABCs of decency. If hypocrisy were an Olympic sport, NUI Galway would have a cabinet full of gold medals.
What’s even more astonishing is that, despite lavishing tens of thousands on glossy consultants peddling PowerPoints about “best practice,” the university’s management still couldn’t stop themselves from discriminating against their own female staff.
The saga started in 2014, when Dr. Micheline Sheehy Skeffington trounced them in the Equality Tribunal, which ruled she had been denied promotion purely because of her gender—a finding so unambiguous it might as well have been tattooed on the President’s forehead. Naturally, the university’s reaction was to dig itself into an even deeper hole: more lawsuits, more public humiliation, and more damning verdicts confirming that, yes, they were as incompetent as they appeared. It took years of relentless campaigning, a major institutional review by the Higher Education Authority, and direct political intervention to drag NUI Galway—kicking and squealing—toward the most basic reforms. The spectacle of an institution that smugly teaches human rights law while serially violating it in its own corridors was almost too perfect to parody. If the university’s leadership had set out to prove there isn’t a single capable intellect in the entire management class, they couldn’t have done a better job.
Of all the grotesque little sideshows in Irish academia, few can top the spectacle of the GMIT lecturer (now renamed Atlantic Technical University) who decided his contribution to the advancement of learning would be to bore peepholes into the toilet cubicle walls. Apparently, the rigours of supervising half-baked dissertations just weren’t stimulating enough, so he took it upon himself to transform the lavatory into his own sordid observatory, complete with heavy breathing to really enrich the experience. One almost has to admire the dedication: here was a man determined to prove that no matter how low your expectations of academic professionalism sink, there is always someone ready to tunnel under them—literally. His punishment? He was not fired but confined to the staff toilets in future! Genius. Find out more here.
In the end, the spectacle of Irish academia reveals itself for what it truly is: a bloated, self-congratulating circus of mediocrities draped in borrowed prestige. These are institutions that preach equality while discriminating, that teach due diligence while torching public money, and that claim to be guardians of knowledge while proving, over and over again, that they can’t manage the most elementary responsibilities without descending into scandal. If this is the best our universities can muster, people should finally abandon the quaint notion that academics are necessarily intelligent—because, manifestly, they are not. Perhaps it’s time we stopped pretending these places are anything more than taxpayer-funded theme parks for overpaid dullards whose only real talent is failing upward.
EJ
John McGuirk, speaking at the recent Ireland Uncensored event, blamed Ireland’s growing governmental nannyism and numptyism on the ‘useless graduate’. Read more
Despite newspaper reports that Ireland was once a ‘deeply misogynistic’ society, the word makes only one appearance in the commission’s Read more
