SEANAD REPORT:IT WAS not good enough that Trinity College had, with the stroke of a pen, decided to call everybody who was lecturing in the college a professor, Cáit Keane (FG) said. She called on the Minister for Education to "have defined in Ireland the term professor".

The Trinity action would put lecturers in other universities at a disadvantage when they were applying for jobs, she maintained.

“If we are talking about standardisation in education, I think professorships should be on a meritocratic system, as it was of old where you had to have a certain amount of papers published in the discipline that you were required to be a professor in or to hold a chair at the university before you were appointed professor.”

There should not be a system such as that in America where a professor with a capital “P” lectured in university and a professor with a small “p” lectured at an institute or college, Ms Keane said.

Fine Gael members in Roscommon were considering mass resignations because of the way the electorate had been conned over the retention of the accident emergency service at Roscommon County Hospital, Terry Leyden (FF) claimed.

If Minister for Health James Reilly could visit China, he should come to the House to explain why commitments in regard to Roscommon had been reneged on.

It was regrettable the issue was about to surface in the presidential election, Mr Leyden added. Local Fine Gael activists had said they would find it difficult, if not impossible, to canvass for Gay Mitchell.

Martin Conway (FG) said he had been shocked to read reports about an Indian takeaway in a Dublin suburb paying someone 51 cent an hour for a 77-hour working week with just one day off a year. “We have inspectors who go into restaurants to make sure the toilets and the floors are clean and that checklists are carried out.

“God almighty, how could this happen in this city, in this country?”