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DCU President hosts briefing of local City and County Councillors

Dublin City University President, Prof. Brian MacCraith, hosted a briefing of local representatives from the university’s surrounding areas in the Albert College building on DCU campus yesterday. With many of the attendees having been elected to their seats in the May elections, it was an opportunity for President MacCraith to ‘initiate a dialogue’ between the university and the relatively new local councils.

In an introductory presentation, the visiting councillors, from Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council, were briefed on a wide variety of initiatives carried out by DCU over the past number of years that focus on the maintenance of a strong relationship between college and community. Information was provided on the success of DCU’s Access programme, which provides students from areas of social or economic disadvantage with the opportunity to attend the university. Students of the programme have a 93% completion rate at DCU with 20% of the student body now ‘non-traditional’ students.

Prof. MacCraith also brought those in attendance up to speed on the DCU Incorporation Programme, which is the planned coming together of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Mater Dei Institute of Education and Church of Ireland College of Education with Dublin City University. The vision of the DCU Incorporation Programme includes a new Institute of Education and an enhanced Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences that will incorporate the combined strengths of the founding institutions.

A briefing of DCU’s strategic plan, ‘Transforming Lives and Societies,’ was also given to the attendees, with special emphasis placed on the engagement aspects of that plan. Described as ‘the antithesis of an ivory towers university,’ Prof. MacCraith conveyed DCU’s excellent track record of getting involved with the local community in a very beneficial way. Such initiatives that have been rolled out over the past number of years include the DCU Intergenerational Programme, which was set up to engage older people from the wider community and DCU students in teaching and learning together in a third level environment. The ‘Green Way’ collaboration involving DCU, Dublin City Council and Finglas County Council is another example, which merged knowledge, expertise and experience in order to stimulate transformational change for the Irish cleantech sector

Other areas of note that were mentioned in the briefing include the university’s focus on attracting students from Ireland’s ‘Eastern Corridor,’ which contains the most rapidly-expanding population in the country, the GAA’s National Development Centre that is soon to arrive at theDCUSportsgrounds and the topic of transportation was also spoken about, with a view to further improveDCU’s public transport services in the coming months.