2007 Press Releases
Conferring Ceremonies at University College Cork (UCC) - September 11th 2007
11.09.2007
Conferring ceremonies continued today (September 11th 2007) at UCC with 516 undergraduate and postgraduate students graduating from the Colleges of Business & Law and Science, Engineering & Food Science.
11.09.2007
Conferring ceremonies continued today (September 11th 2007) at UCC with 516 undergraduate and postgraduate students graduating from the Colleges of Business & Law and Science, Engineering & Food Science.
Four hundred and four students graduated from the College of Business & Law followed by 112 from the College of Science, Engineering & Food Science.
The Conferring Addresses were given by Ms Niamh Bhreathnach, former Minister for Education (attached) and Mr John Bowen, Bowen Group (attached).
_________________________________________
Conferring Address by Ms Niamh Bhreathnach, former Minister for Education, Tuesday, September 11th 2007, 10.00am & 12.30pm
President, Deans, distinguished members of the faculty of Commerce, honoured guests, parents, families and graduates of BSc (Accounting) BSc (Information Systems) and MBS (Co-operative and Social Enterprise) plus BComm and PhDs, I have been invited here to address the graduates and pay tribute to each and every one of you on realising a dream today. You have just become part of your university's graduate history. How proud you must be. How proud the university is of you.
Over the years, UCC has played a very big and important role in the living tradition of Cork. It is proud of its history and its traditions. It has educated many famous Irish people. Today acquiring the status of graduate, bachelor or master, being conferred with this degree is, whatever world you move to, work or more study, relevant to the continuing pursuit of knowledge that will benefit not only you as an individual but will, I assure you, benefit society too.
Ten years ago I came on one of my last visits as Minister to this College. I came among other things to thank the then President and his staff for their contribution to a debate that led to the passing of the Universities Act 1997. It had been a difficult time. With zeal, the university sector had, on sight of a proposed Universities Act, entered the fray and robustly taken on the Minister's proposals.
Eyebrows were raised in all universities at the gender implications of the Bill, the notion that the paymaster might inspect the books rendered some, not all, speechless. Changes suggested in the composition of the Government Body were seen as implied criticism. Early correspondence that flew between Presidents, the Provost, the Master and the Minister reveal the terror that change can induce in people, even university presidents and their staff. Yet the colleges, including this one, engaged fully in the debate, saw many of their proposals adopted and were, when the Act passed, able to welcome its enactment.
One contributor to the debate, from Cork, advised opposing the Bill totally "in the expectation that the Government will back off rather than endure an embarrassing defeat." Alas he was wrong, it was not the government who were embarrassed by defeat, it was me in the subsequent election. But those of us entrusted with the education system at that time recognised that our world was changing. The change had to be managed and the structure of our universities had to reflect that change. You were all then school children, children in an education system that still saw university as a privilege.
For my generation the basic qualification for many walks of life was the Primary Certificate. It was only after free second-level education was introduced in 1967 that the key qualification became the Leaving Certificate, a university degree an exception. By the time I left office, university was less a privilege, more a right, and was freely opening gates to over 50,000 undergraduates, a number that has steadily grown.
While the lobbyists for the return to fees suggest the old way of funding the third level sector was a better way, may I counsel caution. The vast majority of the member states of the European Union allow access to third level free. Following the introduction of a fee by Tony Blair's Labour Government, the numbers attending university in England fell. A fall in the number of graduates would be catastrophic for the Irish economy.
This is not the occasion to defend the free fees initiative; it is your day. But you are, I am reminded, graduating in a time when entry to college is free for those coming through our secondary school system. I feel obliged to refer to the debate if only to tell you why, I believe, the State was right to subsidise your education.
The State needs you as much as you have needed the State up to to day. With your degree you have qualified to contribute to our highly skilled and highly educated, workforce. It means that your university not only had an enormous part to play in your life chances as an individual but is, in its continuing work, contributing to the welfare of community here, in Cork and in Ireland. You are a good investment.
You are our human capital. The OECD defines human capital as "the value of incomes that stem from education training and other investments in human development, an important element enabling countries to move from a low to a high level of income" It goes on to recognise that "One of the external components of fast economic growth in Ireland over the past three decades has been a rapid improvement in the average level of education in the workforce." That rapid improvement must not now be halted.
I have been driven in my work in education by a phrase my father used when any one of his five daughters threatened to leave the fee paying secondary school system of the 60s; education he told us over and over again is the key to your life chances. Whether I was teaching in my inner city class room or remediating some of the brightest but most dyslexic of geniuses, I was aware of the great responsibility of the education system to help all find that key and show how it worked.
And then I was appointed by Dick Spring to be the first and so far only Labour Minister for Education. I had been given responsibility for the education system. It led me to publish, after much discussion between the partners in education, a White Paper, "Charting our Education Future", outlining changes that were needed, including change at third level, if we were to improve access and quality of the education system in time for the 21st century, in time for you.
In the interest of equality of access, I pursued many initiatives from Early Start for three year olds to Free Fees for undergraduate students. And let us not forget those who are still fighting the odds just to be here. Children of that inner city cohort who were privileged in 1994 to find a place on an Early Start initiative are only teenagers this year. With pride I can tell you that the whole of the early starters in my old school went on to secondary school recently, a first ever for their community. Only time will tell whether they survive the system to walk through the gates of any university. It is time to salute those among you today who have achieved your parchment despite experiencing your own particular difficulties. Access, as you know only too well, is not all just about free fees.
For the State investing in your future has been a very long-term investment. Yet to exclude any group, whatever the disability, from the benefits of education can never be acceptable in a democracy. And thus my early work on equality is as important an element in my education philosophy as my teaching experience. The pursuit of equality is an integral part of the historic evolution of all democratic societies.
Achieving this ideal calls for priorities in Government spending. We have some way yet to go in Ireland. The Danes, it is worth reminding ourselves, devote 8.4% of their GDP to education. We lie almost bottom of the EU list, just above Greece, with our 4.3%. Surely increasing that investment is the way to go for those fighting to resolve today's cash crisis at third level.
I came to this platform to speak of you. I choose to remind you of Ireland's need of you and your talents. If I harped on the economic payback I did so because it is the language of a world most of you are likely to prosper in. I passionately believe that the campaign for increased funding is only beginning. You, by graduating, have become part of that campaign.
So go forth and use this education. Thank your families, friends, partners and teachers for their support. Remember college. Most importantly of all, seek to inspire a member or members of the next generation of corkonians to follow in your footsteps. Become informed citizens, participate in the society that has so heavily invested in you and most importantly of all live a fulfilled life and enjoy.
__________________________________
Conferring Address by Mr John Bowen, Chairman & Chief Executive, The Bowen Group, Tuesday, September 11th 2007, 3.30pm
By any standards this is a hugely significant day in the lives of each of you new graduates of this University. It is also an occasion of special celebration for your families, your loved ones, your teachers, your friends and the entire community.
Each of you has a personal story of ambition and achievement, setback and struggle on your journey to today, and I salute you and congratulate on your great personal achievement.
I am deeply honoured to have been asked by the President, Michael Murphy, to give this conferring address, and particularly to be doing so at a conferring of Engineering and Commerce graduates.
As an engineering student here in the second half of the 1970s I fully subscribed to the belief, nay the certainty, that engineers were IT, and that the rest, and perhaps most particularly Commerce, just weren't! It was maybe an early premonition of the Accountant versus Engineer argument but in the event, it didn't take long in the real world of work to realise just how wide of the mark that belief actually was.
Engineering is a fine discipline and the formation of engineers through academic programmes such as many of you have completed, confers on you hugely powerful analytical and problem-solving skills. The intellectual toolkit with which you are now equipped, by virtue of your engineering training has applications way beyond your participation in that profession. I suppose the most eloquent testimony to the truth of this is the number of engineering graduates who opt not to pursue careers in the engineering field, but who go to pursue careers in other areas, and who indeed are actively sought by prospective employers such as large accountancy practices.
Engineering is an essential component of a sustainably successful economy, given the absolute commercial reality of a need to relentlessly innovate in the competitive business world of shortening product and service life-cycles.
Commerce lies at the heart of business. In fact, commerce is another word for business. Business is what generates the economic activity which provides the jobs, which pays the taxes that support our society. Its fundamental importance to society is impossible to overstate. The skills and disciplines of Commerce; management, accounting, strategy, marketing, economics, tax, budgeting, information systems, insurance, , trade and banking, to name a few, lie at the very core of business. As postgraduates of the Faculty of Commerce you understand this perfectly.
When I was an undergraduate the very thought that the concepts of commerce were relevant to engineering was really beyond imagining. We really didn't rate them at all. With a belief system such as that, early days at work could prove a bewildering experience, as engineers negotiate the steep learning curve that teaches how engineering as a profession operates within a certain context- a context of costs, budgets and commercial terms and conditions. They very quickly learn as this one did, that the subject areas of Commerce are very important ones indeed.
Looking back on it now I realise how enlightened was Professor Dillon in requiring us in final year Civil Engineering to take a subject called Management, taught through the medium of case studies by Professor Wrigley from the faculty of Commerce.
The dynamic between the somewhat reluctant engineers and Professor Wrigley in those sessions was really interesting. One case study surrounded the demise of Rolls-Royce Aero Engines in the early seventies which provided an early warning of what the future might hold, but we didn't get it! The case centred around the collapse of one of the greatest businesses in its field with world class R&D and product development capabilities, but which had completely insufficient cash flow and profits from sales of mature products to fund the research, product development and testing of these technically superior new engines. After a long period of discussion about the case, Professor Wrigley asked the engineers the simple basic question "Why did Rolls Royce fail? He received a variety of answers from the class which he found individually and in aggregate less than convincing, and then he gravely pronounced that the reason Rolls Royce failed was because "It was run by engineers"!
The skills learned in Engineering form the basis of great businesses. The skills learned and honed in the Faculty of Commerce are utterly essential to the orderly functioning of those and other businesses. Putting it bluntly, in business, engineering operates in a context in which accountants and bankers rule!
In my career I soon recognised that if you can't beat these dreaded Commerce people, you might as well join them. As a young engineer I joined the management consulting division of one of the world's leading accountancy firms. I very quickly came to understand the fundamental conflict in philosophy between the engineer's training to define a problem first, then to craft a perfectly tailored solution to that unique problem, and the consultant's approach which began with the template of a perfect solution that worked in all circumstances, the task being to make the problem fit that perfect solution!
I applied to enter the academic world of Commerce by doing a Masters in Business Administration. Having successfully completed that degree through the medium of distance learning I emerged with a totally new toolkit and a wiser and more balanced perspective on the relative merits of Engineering and Commerce.
The truth is that both disciplines have interdependencies and linkages that are not seen until experienced. It is as preposterous to suggest that engineers can live happily and successfully in complete ignorance of, and indifference to, the world of Commerce as it is to suggest the reverse. Truly are the apparent "certainties" of undergraduate life washed away by experience. In fact observation shows that there are many more courses offering "Finance for the non financial engineer" than there are offering "Engineering for the non technical accountant".
Most ambitious professionals aspire to reach senior levels in their chosen field. Usually this requires management skills. Clearly the disciplines of management are very different to those of academic subjects, and much more so in the case of applied sciences or engineering. I would like to tell you the story of the very recent honours graduate in Management straight out of College, who sat before me at an interview for a very junior management position in my organisation. "What sort of a job do you think this is"? "A management job" was the confident reply. When I asked what he thought the appropriate job title would be, the answer was "A manager". "What exactly do you feel you could manage" I asked, following which there was a long silence!
The serious point of all this and the message of inspiration I would like to share based on my own experience, is "Be ambitious"! Aspire to the highest standards in all you do! Work hard but realise that working smart is more productive and efficient. Success doesn't come easy and is in any case measured in different ways by different people. Respect capable professionals in disciplines different to your own, recognise in them the true worth of what they do. Be kind to the environment and towards your fellow human beings. Develop commonsense- a commodity that is truly very far from being common!
Engineering and Commerce, whether mastered at undergraduate level or further along the academic continuum are two fine bases on which to build a career that is challenging and rewarding as any you could wish for. A successful economy needs the creative genius of engineers to develop the technologies on which tomorrow's mighty businesses will be based. It also needs the balancing genius of capable financial professionals to allow those engineers see the achievement of the full commercial potential of the same technologies. That the terms "Value Engineering" and "Financial Engineering" have joined the lexicon is a salutary reminder that some of those early apparent certainties founded on misconception really aren't.
Enjoy today- your day! Thank you for allowing me to be part of it and remember that tomorrow is the very first day of the rest of your lives. Go out there and live!
Per Ardua ad Astra
Picture shows: UCC President, Dr Michael Murphy with Cliodhna O'Dwyer who graduated with a BComm (European with German) and her grandmother, Mrs Mary O'Dwyer who graduated with a BComm in 1937.
510MMcS
The Conferring Addresses were given by Ms Niamh Bhreathnach, former Minister for Education (attached) and Mr John Bowen, Bowen Group (attached).
_________________________________________
Conferring Address by Ms Niamh Bhreathnach, former Minister for Education, Tuesday, September 11th 2007, 10.00am & 12.30pm
President, Deans, distinguished members of the faculty of Commerce, honoured guests, parents, families and graduates of BSc (Accounting) BSc (Information Systems) and MBS (Co-operative and Social Enterprise) plus BComm and PhDs, I have been invited here to address the graduates and pay tribute to each and every one of you on realising a dream today. You have just become part of your university's graduate history. How proud you must be. How proud the university is of you.
Over the years, UCC has played a very big and important role in the living tradition of Cork. It is proud of its history and its traditions. It has educated many famous Irish people. Today acquiring the status of graduate, bachelor or master, being conferred with this degree is, whatever world you move to, work or more study, relevant to the continuing pursuit of knowledge that will benefit not only you as an individual but will, I assure you, benefit society too.
Ten years ago I came on one of my last visits as Minister to this College. I came among other things to thank the then President and his staff for their contribution to a debate that led to the passing of the Universities Act 1997. It had been a difficult time. With zeal, the university sector had, on sight of a proposed Universities Act, entered the fray and robustly taken on the Minister's proposals.
Eyebrows were raised in all universities at the gender implications of the Bill, the notion that the paymaster might inspect the books rendered some, not all, speechless. Changes suggested in the composition of the Government Body were seen as implied criticism. Early correspondence that flew between Presidents, the Provost, the Master and the Minister reveal the terror that change can induce in people, even university presidents and their staff. Yet the colleges, including this one, engaged fully in the debate, saw many of their proposals adopted and were, when the Act passed, able to welcome its enactment.
One contributor to the debate, from Cork, advised opposing the Bill totally "in the expectation that the Government will back off rather than endure an embarrassing defeat." Alas he was wrong, it was not the government who were embarrassed by defeat, it was me in the subsequent election. But those of us entrusted with the education system at that time recognised that our world was changing. The change had to be managed and the structure of our universities had to reflect that change. You were all then school children, children in an education system that still saw university as a privilege.
For my generation the basic qualification for many walks of life was the Primary Certificate. It was only after free second-level education was introduced in 1967 that the key qualification became the Leaving Certificate, a university degree an exception. By the time I left office, university was less a privilege, more a right, and was freely opening gates to over 50,000 undergraduates, a number that has steadily grown.
While the lobbyists for the return to fees suggest the old way of funding the third level sector was a better way, may I counsel caution. The vast majority of the member states of the European Union allow access to third level free. Following the introduction of a fee by Tony Blair's Labour Government, the numbers attending university in England fell. A fall in the number of graduates would be catastrophic for the Irish economy.
This is not the occasion to defend the free fees initiative; it is your day. But you are, I am reminded, graduating in a time when entry to college is free for those coming through our secondary school system. I feel obliged to refer to the debate if only to tell you why, I believe, the State was right to subsidise your education.
The State needs you as much as you have needed the State up to to day. With your degree you have qualified to contribute to our highly skilled and highly educated, workforce. It means that your university not only had an enormous part to play in your life chances as an individual but is, in its continuing work, contributing to the welfare of community here, in Cork and in Ireland. You are a good investment.
You are our human capital. The OECD defines human capital as "the value of incomes that stem from education training and other investments in human development, an important element enabling countries to move from a low to a high level of income" It goes on to recognise that "One of the external components of fast economic growth in Ireland over the past three decades has been a rapid improvement in the average level of education in the workforce." That rapid improvement must not now be halted.
I have been driven in my work in education by a phrase my father used when any one of his five daughters threatened to leave the fee paying secondary school system of the 60s; education he told us over and over again is the key to your life chances. Whether I was teaching in my inner city class room or remediating some of the brightest but most dyslexic of geniuses, I was aware of the great responsibility of the education system to help all find that key and show how it worked.
And then I was appointed by Dick Spring to be the first and so far only Labour Minister for Education. I had been given responsibility for the education system. It led me to publish, after much discussion between the partners in education, a White Paper, "Charting our Education Future", outlining changes that were needed, including change at third level, if we were to improve access and quality of the education system in time for the 21st century, in time for you.
In the interest of equality of access, I pursued many initiatives from Early Start for three year olds to Free Fees for undergraduate students. And let us not forget those who are still fighting the odds just to be here. Children of that inner city cohort who were privileged in 1994 to find a place on an Early Start initiative are only teenagers this year. With pride I can tell you that the whole of the early starters in my old school went on to secondary school recently, a first ever for their community. Only time will tell whether they survive the system to walk through the gates of any university. It is time to salute those among you today who have achieved your parchment despite experiencing your own particular difficulties. Access, as you know only too well, is not all just about free fees.
For the State investing in your future has been a very long-term investment. Yet to exclude any group, whatever the disability, from the benefits of education can never be acceptable in a democracy. And thus my early work on equality is as important an element in my education philosophy as my teaching experience. The pursuit of equality is an integral part of the historic evolution of all democratic societies.
Achieving this ideal calls for priorities in Government spending. We have some way yet to go in Ireland. The Danes, it is worth reminding ourselves, devote 8.4% of their GDP to education. We lie almost bottom of the EU list, just above Greece, with our 4.3%. Surely increasing that investment is the way to go for those fighting to resolve today's cash crisis at third level.
I came to this platform to speak of you. I choose to remind you of Ireland's need of you and your talents. If I harped on the economic payback I did so because it is the language of a world most of you are likely to prosper in. I passionately believe that the campaign for increased funding is only beginning. You, by graduating, have become part of that campaign.
So go forth and use this education. Thank your families, friends, partners and teachers for their support. Remember college. Most importantly of all, seek to inspire a member or members of the next generation of corkonians to follow in your footsteps. Become informed citizens, participate in the society that has so heavily invested in you and most importantly of all live a fulfilled life and enjoy.
__________________________________
Conferring Address by Mr John Bowen, Chairman & Chief Executive, The Bowen Group, Tuesday, September 11th 2007, 3.30pm
By any standards this is a hugely significant day in the lives of each of you new graduates of this University. It is also an occasion of special celebration for your families, your loved ones, your teachers, your friends and the entire community.
Each of you has a personal story of ambition and achievement, setback and struggle on your journey to today, and I salute you and congratulate on your great personal achievement.
I am deeply honoured to have been asked by the President, Michael Murphy, to give this conferring address, and particularly to be doing so at a conferring of Engineering and Commerce graduates.
As an engineering student here in the second half of the 1970s I fully subscribed to the belief, nay the certainty, that engineers were IT, and that the rest, and perhaps most particularly Commerce, just weren't! It was maybe an early premonition of the Accountant versus Engineer argument but in the event, it didn't take long in the real world of work to realise just how wide of the mark that belief actually was.
Engineering is a fine discipline and the formation of engineers through academic programmes such as many of you have completed, confers on you hugely powerful analytical and problem-solving skills. The intellectual toolkit with which you are now equipped, by virtue of your engineering training has applications way beyond your participation in that profession. I suppose the most eloquent testimony to the truth of this is the number of engineering graduates who opt not to pursue careers in the engineering field, but who go to pursue careers in other areas, and who indeed are actively sought by prospective employers such as large accountancy practices.
Engineering is an essential component of a sustainably successful economy, given the absolute commercial reality of a need to relentlessly innovate in the competitive business world of shortening product and service life-cycles.
Commerce lies at the heart of business. In fact, commerce is another word for business. Business is what generates the economic activity which provides the jobs, which pays the taxes that support our society. Its fundamental importance to society is impossible to overstate. The skills and disciplines of Commerce; management, accounting, strategy, marketing, economics, tax, budgeting, information systems, insurance, , trade and banking, to name a few, lie at the very core of business. As postgraduates of the Faculty of Commerce you understand this perfectly.
When I was an undergraduate the very thought that the concepts of commerce were relevant to engineering was really beyond imagining. We really didn't rate them at all. With a belief system such as that, early days at work could prove a bewildering experience, as engineers negotiate the steep learning curve that teaches how engineering as a profession operates within a certain context- a context of costs, budgets and commercial terms and conditions. They very quickly learn as this one did, that the subject areas of Commerce are very important ones indeed.
Looking back on it now I realise how enlightened was Professor Dillon in requiring us in final year Civil Engineering to take a subject called Management, taught through the medium of case studies by Professor Wrigley from the faculty of Commerce.
The dynamic between the somewhat reluctant engineers and Professor Wrigley in those sessions was really interesting. One case study surrounded the demise of Rolls-Royce Aero Engines in the early seventies which provided an early warning of what the future might hold, but we didn't get it! The case centred around the collapse of one of the greatest businesses in its field with world class R&D and product development capabilities, but which had completely insufficient cash flow and profits from sales of mature products to fund the research, product development and testing of these technically superior new engines. After a long period of discussion about the case, Professor Wrigley asked the engineers the simple basic question "Why did Rolls Royce fail? He received a variety of answers from the class which he found individually and in aggregate less than convincing, and then he gravely pronounced that the reason Rolls Royce failed was because "It was run by engineers"!
The skills learned in Engineering form the basis of great businesses. The skills learned and honed in the Faculty of Commerce are utterly essential to the orderly functioning of those and other businesses. Putting it bluntly, in business, engineering operates in a context in which accountants and bankers rule!
In my career I soon recognised that if you can't beat these dreaded Commerce people, you might as well join them. As a young engineer I joined the management consulting division of one of the world's leading accountancy firms. I very quickly came to understand the fundamental conflict in philosophy between the engineer's training to define a problem first, then to craft a perfectly tailored solution to that unique problem, and the consultant's approach which began with the template of a perfect solution that worked in all circumstances, the task being to make the problem fit that perfect solution!
I applied to enter the academic world of Commerce by doing a Masters in Business Administration. Having successfully completed that degree through the medium of distance learning I emerged with a totally new toolkit and a wiser and more balanced perspective on the relative merits of Engineering and Commerce.
The truth is that both disciplines have interdependencies and linkages that are not seen until experienced. It is as preposterous to suggest that engineers can live happily and successfully in complete ignorance of, and indifference to, the world of Commerce as it is to suggest the reverse. Truly are the apparent "certainties" of undergraduate life washed away by experience. In fact observation shows that there are many more courses offering "Finance for the non financial engineer" than there are offering "Engineering for the non technical accountant".
Most ambitious professionals aspire to reach senior levels in their chosen field. Usually this requires management skills. Clearly the disciplines of management are very different to those of academic subjects, and much more so in the case of applied sciences or engineering. I would like to tell you the story of the very recent honours graduate in Management straight out of College, who sat before me at an interview for a very junior management position in my organisation. "What sort of a job do you think this is"? "A management job" was the confident reply. When I asked what he thought the appropriate job title would be, the answer was "A manager". "What exactly do you feel you could manage" I asked, following which there was a long silence!
The serious point of all this and the message of inspiration I would like to share based on my own experience, is "Be ambitious"! Aspire to the highest standards in all you do! Work hard but realise that working smart is more productive and efficient. Success doesn't come easy and is in any case measured in different ways by different people. Respect capable professionals in disciplines different to your own, recognise in them the true worth of what they do. Be kind to the environment and towards your fellow human beings. Develop commonsense- a commodity that is truly very far from being common!
Engineering and Commerce, whether mastered at undergraduate level or further along the academic continuum are two fine bases on which to build a career that is challenging and rewarding as any you could wish for. A successful economy needs the creative genius of engineers to develop the technologies on which tomorrow's mighty businesses will be based. It also needs the balancing genius of capable financial professionals to allow those engineers see the achievement of the full commercial potential of the same technologies. That the terms "Value Engineering" and "Financial Engineering" have joined the lexicon is a salutary reminder that some of those early apparent certainties founded on misconception really aren't.
Enjoy today- your day! Thank you for allowing me to be part of it and remember that tomorrow is the very first day of the rest of your lives. Go out there and live!
Per Ardua ad Astra
Picture shows: UCC President, Dr Michael Murphy with Cliodhna O'Dwyer who graduated with a BComm (European with German) and her grandmother, Mrs Mary O'Dwyer who graduated with a BComm in 1937.
510MMcS