For our listeners in the US, can you give us a quick picture of higher education in Ireland? What are some of the things about the Irish system that would surprise American faculty and administrators?

Sure.

Absolutely.

So I think, um, the first thing is just to remind and highlight listeners that Ireland is a really small country.

Um, so we have a population of about five and a half million people.

Um, we're probably one of the only countries in the world that has a population that is smaller now than it was about 180 years ago, uh, before the famine.

So we had been up around eight or nine million.

But now that students have access to these powerful AI tools that can generate information, summarize content, even produce polished work products, has that changed your thinking about what universities should be helping students develop?

Is it moving too fast for universities to be able to adapt and develop policies and decide how are we going to integrate this in what we do?

Yes, I think it's moving probably too fast for many people.

We hear Anthropic yesterday even just talk about perhaps slowing it down.

The nature of universities is that, you know, they're purposefully slow to change because they really, they're underpinned by this idea of academic integrity and rigour and you have to balance kind of rigour with speed of change and acceleration.

because universities have a huge kind of signalling function.

So what I mean by that is when a student gets a degree, it's a signal to society or employers that they have a certain level of knowledge, of competence, et cetera, et cetera.

And some of that signalling is explicit in their transcript, but some of it is invisible, that actually it's not really visible to a potential employer, but it's kind of indicated that they have perseverance, that they're trainable, et cetera, et cetera.

What would