Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their time and their presentations. I also thank the Chairman and the secretariat for arranging this meeting. It is important for us to review the operations of these grants to see if we can make the system better.

I wanted to use this meeting to emphasise the lack of discretion in respect of these applications. I know that SUSI has to operate within guidelines but while some schemes, such as the medical card scheme, have a very arbitrary financial threshold, there is more discretion in other schemes and I would like to see more discretion in this case. As Senator Marie Moloney said, it is bizarre to say that somebody on €40,000 per year can afford to send a child to college while somebody on €39,000 cannot. This cut-off point is arbitrary and too severe. What suggestions does SUSI have for us, as legislators, to improve the system within which it has to work? How can we bring less rigidity and more flexibility into the system?

I note that SUSI has turned out to be a huge disappointment in some quarters. There were huge hopes at one point that it would turn into another Irish Water and become a new whipping boy but it has disappointed many in the media and in opposition by putting together a very formidable operation. We cannot overestimate the achievement of SUSI in taking 43 awarding authorities and combining them into one system. There were teething difficulties, of course, and it is not long ago that this committee met its representatives in Buswells Hotel on the matter. I was very impressed with the presentation on that day. SUSI was the first body to get its head around the idea of Departments talking to other Departments, which is something for which we had hoped for a long time. A colleague of mine in the Dáil, Deputy Willie O'Dea, said not so long ago that nobody in Ireland would now consider calling their child Susie.