Strategic Planning - Looking Ahead

The College closed out one strategic plan and developed its successor during the year under review.

A Flourishing Learning Community, the Strategic Plan 2018–2024, was brought to a structured conclusion rather than a narrative one. The College conducted a full audit and impact assessment of the plan: an operational action register recording delivery against every committed action, a register testing whether the plan as executed remained the plan as adopted, an impact self-evaluation, and a set of final verdicts reconciled across all seven pillars, with comparative analysis conducted throughout against a baseline academic year of 2016/17. The findings were reported to An tÚdarás Rialaithe and made available to the College’s external auditors, with evidence-anchored responses provided in respect of the key enabling actions examined. The exercise gave the Governing Authority an evidenced account of what the plan had and had not delivered, and established the evidentiary discipline — canonical action registers, defined baselines, status determinations tied to evidence - that has been carried into the monitoring architecture for the successor plan. The detail of these findings will be reported in the 2025-2026 annual report.

Professor Dermot Nestor took office as the eleventh President of MIC in November, following the retirement of Prof. Eugene Wall, and led the development of the new strategic plan, Pathways Lit, Futures Found, throughout the year. That the process was led from the office of a new President, in his first year, gave it a particular character. It began from an extended period of listening across both campuses rather than from a drafting exercise, and it took the measure of the institution as its incoming President found it before committing the College to a direction. The plan that emerged is accordingly the President’s plan and the College’s together: it carries the priorities he set out on taking office, tested against what the College community said of its own work, its constraints and its ambitions.

The plan responds to conditions the College cannot control but must answer - technological acceleration, ecological disruption, demographic change and shifting cultural expectations of higher education - and it positions the College to meet them from its own tradition: rooted in care for the person, committed to human dignity and flourishing, and holding to the conviction that education is an act of illumination.

Implementation is through Annual Operating Plans approved by An tÚdarás Rialaithe and tracked quarterly, supported by a canonical register of actions and a KPI dashboard. Progress is reviewed quarterly by the Strategic Implementation Group and reported to An tÚdarás Rialaithe through the President’s report to each meeting, alongside progress against the College’s Performance Agreement 2024-2028 with the Higher Education Authority.

The formal launch of Pathways Lit, Futures Found took place after the end of the reporting period and is recorded in the 2025–26 report.