Ms Jacinta Stewart:

Students are paid once they are registered. We receive notification of their registration from their college so, effectively, the majority of students are paid from October onwards.

Looking back in terms of what happened at the time, we had a huge amount of documents. I am conscious that Deputies received a lot of complaints at the time. One of the things we were really anxious to do was to link with other statutory bodies. A number of those statutory bodies are particularly important for us such as the Department of Social Protection, the Revenue Commissioners and the General Register Office. We can now link up with those bodies within 24 hours. In 2012 students had to get that documentation themselves which led to a massive amount of documentation. We co-operate with other bodies but the three I outlined have been particularly important for us.

In terms of how we operate internally, we have streamlined the grants as students come to us. We have a pre-assessment which is going on currently and we seek a minimum amount of documents from students. Most students will only need two documents but in 2012 we could have sought between ten to 12 documents.