Brendan Ryan (Dublin North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Ms Stewart for her presentation. The delays in the grant application process are not new. However, SUSI was put in place to sort out these delays. In a short period of its existence, the agency is already in crisis management mode which is totally unacceptable. I am not going to focus on what is being done to sort out the problems. I believe Ms Stewart will sort them out as she has outlined what she is trying to do in that regard.

Instead, I want to focus on the preparations for the major task City of Dublin VEC took on. It clearly wanted it and pitched for the tender. How did it prepare for it? It clearly underestimated the task involved and put insufficient resources behind it. Was a project planning team put in place? If so, were the right people on the team? Were widely used project-planning principles followed? In my view, there was a complete failure on the part of City of Dublin VEC to plan properly for this task it took on. It had experience in this area already and would have known the pattern and behaviour of student applications, so there is no excuse. Does the City of Dublin VEC understand what went wrong and how it failed to plan properly for this task?