Griffith College maturing with age
Griffith College is marking its 50th year in 2024. Founder Professor Diarmuid Hegarty spoke to Niall Gormley about the background to the college, its somewhat fractious relationship with the state, attitudes to private provision and access to education.
Over 40,000 students have passed through the corridors of Griffith College’s various campuses in its 50 years of existence. Now ranged across four city campuses with over 200 courses on offer, the college attracts students from all parts of Ireland and all over the world.
Currently over 7,000 students studying at Griffith College making it the second largest private college in Ireland. Its fees are higher than the state sector and its students are not eligible for state grants but it offers an alternative route to qualification for its Irish and international students.
Griffith College’s founder Professor Diarmuid Hegarty believes that the private education sector has a legitimate and valuable role to play and believes that there has been hostility to the sector on ideological grounds.
The early years
Professor Hegarty laid the foundations for the college while he was studying at UCD where he began to teach other students. He became an accountant and noticed that the failure rate for accountancy was very high with up to eight out of ten students not getting through exams.
“When I was at UCD, I taught part time, and I enjoyed it,” he recalls. “I was approached by a number of students who said: ’Look, would you ever give us hand?’ I said, okay, I’ll do it. And I took a group of about 15 or 16 of them together and I taught them in my parent’s dining room, and that’s where it started.”
Spotting a gap in the market – he says there wasn’t a proper education structure for accountancy at all – he set up Business and Accounting Tutors which became Business and Accounting Training.
By this time he could see that the education gap he noticed in accountancy applied in many other areas as well. He thinks that many people couldn’t work with the Leaving Cert process and that their needs were not being addressed.
Expansion and renaming
The college expanded through the 1980’s and by the end of the decade he was looking for a new home. His dream of a campus came to fruition when Griffith Barracks on Dublin’s South Circular Road came up for sale. It was a historic site built as a prison called Richmond Bridewell in the early 1800’s, with Daniel O’Connell and Young Ireland leaders Thomas Francis Meagher and William Smith O’Brien as prisoners.
In the late 1800’s it was taken over by the British Army and renamed Wellington Barracks. After the War of Independence the barracks was handed over to the Free State army and renamed again after Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith. The Defence Forces occupied the site until 1988.
When Professor Hegarty bought the site he recognised the value of both its historical and architectural heritage.
“We changed our name to Griffith College when we bought Griffith Barracks. I approached Ita Grey, Arthur Griffith’s daughter. I wrote and asked her if we could use the Griffith name. And she fully supported it. Hopefully, we’ve made her proud,” he says.
Along with some historic buildings the site includes five acres within Dublin’s canals, very valuable in real estate terms but also ideally located in terms of attracting students from around Ireland and from abroad. The campus has also allowed the college to build student accommodation, Griffith Halls of Residence, which now houses around 600 students.
In keeping with the business approach of the college the Griffith Halls of Residence are rented out in the summer months to visitors and tourists to Dublin.
A state apart
Professor Hegarty is very critical of successive government’s attitude to privately owned education and sees it as short sighted and discriminatory. He believes that the policy of not supporting colleges like Griffith discriminates against their students, many of whom do not come from wealthy families and are victims of the points system.
He says that Griffith College is not funded in the same way as state institutions and that their students can’t get Suzi grants. He recalled that previously two Griffith students had made a submission to the Oireachtas Education Committee.
“One of the two funded their fees by a loan from the credit union. The other was funded by a grant from the Vincent De Paul. These are people whose parents who are utterly determined to give their kids an education. Would the State not support those children? The department said ‘no’. They argued that there was no money, for God’s sake.
“There’s a notion somehow, that if education is provided privately, it’s elitism and its privilege. And if anybody deserves to be privileged, it’s those two kids, whose parents have to either go to the credit union or charity in order to give their children a service that they weren’t getting in the state system. So elitism my eye.”
Local potential
He also says that had the state been more supportive that Griffith College could have made a difference in its postal address of Dublin 8.
“The point I’m making is, we could have done a lot more. Particularly in Dublin 8, we could have actually contributed hugely to the getting that percentage of young people attending third level up to towards that of Dublin 6. That is an appalling indictment on the education system. And it’s because of ideology.
“Strangely enough, the politicians support us – the civil servants blocked us. They are utterly opposed to the concept of private education. And they just have got it so wrong. We are not elitist. We are actually providing opportunity for those who basically are left out of the system and we should be encouraged to do so.”
He thinks the Leaving Cert system is biased in favour of middle class parents who can buy grinds for their children. He speaks warmly of current Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris and he thinks he has worked to open up routes into third level.
This interview took place before the resignation of Leo Varadkar as taoiseach and the subsequent election of Harris as leader of Fine Gael.
“The Leaving Certificate is gamed and it’s gamed in the interests of the middle class right now. For many, many years we were picking up the casualties. Simon Harris is actually the first Minister of Education to challenged that.
“In fairness others have introduced the DEIS Schools, others have actually gone part of the way to tackle disadvantage. But it’s the opening out access to third level so that your whole life isn’t determined by your CEO points. That’s the major change that he is brought about, people from further education backgrounds having direct access to university.”
He also credits Harris with putting impetus into the apprenticeship system and extending it into Higher Education to degree level.
Planning for the future
Prof Hegarty says that Griffith College already offers students blended learning and the future plans for the college will weigh up the alternatives of online versus campus learning.
“We’re planning to develop the campus over a ten year period. And we’re in two minds on this. Our feeling is the future probably is in online and blended. But at the same time, a lot of students, probably 40% of students are saying that they want contract.
“So you’ve got to get the balance right. It’s called ‘flipping the classroom’. You actually give students a lecture in which they study beforehand, and then they attend a tutorial. The lecture is online.”
There is also the possibility of another name change, this time to Griffith University. The college is already working on the process of achieving university status.
“We will have a process which starts with an institutional review. Assuming we have we passed through that, and we’re working hard towards it, we will then go through a route whereby we will be assessed for delegated authority,” he says.
University status would be an impressive end destination for Griffith College and Diarmuid Hegarty on a journey that began in his parents’ living room.
