Waterford Institute of Technology

The Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT; ) was an institute of technology, located in Waterford, Ireland. The institute had six constituent schools and offered programmes in business, engineering, science, health sciences, as well as education & humanities. The institute opened in 1970 as a Regional Technical College and adopted its name on 7 May 1997. Along with the Institute of Technology, Carlow, the institute was dissolved on 1 May 2022 and was succeeded by the South East Technological University. History At the time of the founding of the RTC, there were two other third-level institutions in the city, St John's Seminary Waterford News and Star which notes the closing of the St John's Seminary in 1999 and De La Salle Brothers teacher training college, but both had been closed. Waterford politicians made strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to locate a university in Waterford at the time of the formation of the Queen's University of Ireland in the 1840s. The cause was led by Thomas Wyse, Member of Parliament for Waterford City, who was not influential in the House of Commons, having strong Napoleonic links (he married a niece of Napoleon I of France), being a Catholic and leaning towards an independent Ireland. Galway, a much smaller city at the time, won out over Waterford, perhaps because of the necessity for geographical dispersion or to bolster the Irish language. Wyse wrote in the round on the matter in his text "Education reform or the necessity of a national system of education" (London, 1836).