The Government has been under pressure to expand financial support in every direction and Tuesday’s budget saw extra current and capital allocations across the board, a response to the recent buoyancy of tax revenue and the unexpected back-taxes due from Apple.

The farming community and the agribusiness sector share a particular interest in one element of educational expenditure: the provision for third-level education in agricultural colleges and in veterinary medicine.

There are to be two new vet schools, in the south east and the north-west, to help meet the demand for places.

Last week’s editorial in the Irish Farmers Journal made the point that the demand for the services of veterinary professionals is not left to the vagaries of the market. The State gets involved, through rules about who can prescribe, as indeed is the case with the medical profession generally.

Prescriptions

Farmers must now cover the cost of prescriptions from vets for vaccines to treat worms, lice, flies and fluke, hitherto available direct from farm stores. But the general public cannot buy certain medicines without a prescription either – there is a fee for the prescribing GP, although the range available from pharmacists on every high street necessarily includes the prescription-only products.

The pharmacists have long battled with the medics on this issue and it would be a surprise to see the medical and veterinary professions volunteer to let retailers, however well-resourced, cut them out of this loop.

Of course the humans, as well as the cattle, deserve to be protected from inappropriate medication. But the resort to assumed health and safety arguments, at customer expense, in the relationship between the State regulators and these two professions looks to be rather cosy.

The shortage of vets is longstanding and is finally to be addressed through the designation of two new universities as venues for undergraduate training. There is to be a role too for agricultural colleges in their regions.

Until recently, only University College Dublin (UCD) offered an undergraduate veterinary programme and a pattern had emerged of Irish vet students registering at universities abroad while UCD had come to rely on enhanced fee income from foreign students who are charged extra.

Leaving Cert points

Admission to UCD for Irish students was rationed through a threshold of Leaving Cert points in excess of the college’s academic requirement, also a feature of competition for places in medicine and some other disciplines.

The two new venues for veterinary training are to be the South East Technological University (SETU), which is mainly of an amalgam of the former institutes of technology at Waterford and Carlow; and the Atlantic Technological University (ATU), a more dispersed entity with operations from Letterkenny in north Donegal to Sligo, Mayo and as far south as Mountbellew in east Galway.

It is surprising that the option of increasing the number of places for Irish students at UCD has not been pursued. In the coming academic year from autumn 2025, there have been reports that the Irish intake of vet students at the University of Warsaw will exceed the numbers likely to be offered places at UCD.

A further surprise is the two locations for expansion. While a second vet college has been mooted for many years, the most obvious locations would be Cork, where a new Munster Technological University is up and running based on the former Cork Institute of Technology, or the University of Limerick.

The latter withdrew its candidacy from a beauty contest run by the Higher Education Authority, apparently on the grounds of capital cost. It appears that UCD quoted higher per-student costs to the Higher Education Authority than did the two winning bids, even though both SETU and ATU would be starting from scratch.

SETU plans to base the new students at Waterford with some time to be spent 25 minutes down the N24 at Kildalton, the long-established agricultural college in Kilkenny run by Teagasc. Things will be more challenging for students opting for ATU. They will be based at Letterkenny with a second location involving a trip of three hours and 18 minutes to the agricultural college at Mountbellew, near Ballinasloe.

Student standpoint

From the student standpoint, either Cork or Limerick would look more attractive if expansion outside Dublin is a priority. Cork is the second-largest population centre in Ireland, Limerick the third.

The current phase of government-by-press-release, of which the location announcements for the new vet colleges are an example, will end as soon as the general election is out of the way. It would then be desirable to have a proper discussion about veterinary training, including location decisions.

In the meantime the ‘bids’ submitted by the various colleges, including UCD and Limerick, detailing the cost estimates and how they were compiled, should be placed openly on the public record.