Looking back at the arrival of the Regional Technical College in 1992 and its huge impact on the community
ECHO AT 45: Historic moment for Tallaght with the opening of the RTC, now TU Dublin Tallaght Campus
MAY 1992: The development of Tallaght has been shaped by a number of key moments in time and the opening of the then Regional Technical College (RTC) back in September 1992 stands as one of the most significant, writes Stephen Leonard.
Not only did the college itself alter the community in a physical sense, but it set in motion a change in psyche as third-level education was finally brought to the doorstep of a region that encompassed many disadvantaged areas and where the prospect of attending college or university was traditionally quite remote.
Indeed, the arrival of the RTC brought with it a very tangible idea of higher-education for the youth of Tallaght and the surrounding areas – this was reinforced by the work of the college’s first principal Dr Columb Collins and his team, particularly in the months leading up to the opening.
“At that stage there weren’t an awful lot of students from the Tallaght area going on to higher education,” recalled Dr Collins.
“So a lot of our job was going out to the schools in the set-up year and telling them we would be on our way and that we’d be glad to meet them.
“We had an open day, but we had no college to show them.
“So the good people in The Square kindly gave us their premises for the night and we had visuals and we had six or seven hundred people in from the area.
“We didn’t have any pictures of the college that we could show to people, but we did have architectural drawings of what it was going to look like.
“We got a great response from the secondary schools in the area, particularly from the principals. They were promoting the college among their students.
“In the end, when we got the students in, we had a look at the home addresses and we reckoned that something like 90 per cent of the students could have cycled to the college.
“It really did have a huge impact on the area and increased the availability of places in higher education,” he insisted.
