Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I have acknowledged in my reply to Deputy O'Brien that higher education in general undoubtedly is experiencing difficulties in trying to provide for increased numbers of students and in trying to provide a wide range of courses in response to pressures from the workplace. I refer, for example, to instances in which workplaces identify the need for a certain number of information technology specialists or whatever it might be and colleges then are trying to respond to that. They certainly are facing pressures but this is an effort to assist them with what I acknowledge to be the same amount of money, albeit they will get some of it a little earlier. In addition, there is another element to it, in so far as Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, now also has become quite efficient. There was a time when not all the grant applications were processed as early as is now the case. People will acknowledge SUSI has become more efficient in the speed at which it processes applications. That may be part of it, although I do not suggest this is the main reason this measure is being taken. However, there was a time when SUSI perhaps did not have a lot of the applications processed before the Christmas period whereas it by and large now does, unless there is some extremely complicating factor.