Mr. Peter Cassells:

What I will try to do, both in the interests of time but also because of the way the questions came up, is to group them according to issue. I will comment on access, the national training levy and then a range of issues relating to how the system works at the moment in terms of accountability, staffing and costs and then Dr. Doris will deal with the questions relating to the operation of a loan system.

Deputy Byrne is right in what he said about the scheme. We struggled with the issue. At one stage, we called them deferred fees. We tried to say it is not a debt in the usual sense because one does not have to pay it if one does not have the resources. At one stage the idea of calling it a graduate tax was in the frame. The way to look at it is as a deferred fees scheme. It is not a debt. If one considers it as a graduate tax then one is repaying the cost of one's education as a result of the significant benefits one got. One only pays if one goes over a certain amount for a specific period. One of the questions the Chairman raised at the beginning was about public engagement and winning public support for the scheme. In our consultations we brought many groups together and spoke to many people. There is no doubt about the great support for the contribution made by higher education and the investment that is required but there was less consensus on how one would fund it. What Deputy Byrne said is correct and the public funding element, as you raised, Chairman, is also important.

The overall point I made in response to the three categories of question is that at the end of the day a lot depends on the scale of one's ambition in terms of what one believes is required to put higher education back in as the key enabler, because that determines the level of increase in funding one needs and it, therefore, determines how one is going to fund it. For example, a number of the questions refer to the fact, and Senator Robbie Gallagher mentioned it, that option one, which is a fully-funded State scheme, appears to deal with the question of access and certainty. The question we had to ask ourselves, and which members have to ask themselves, is what is the increase in taxation that will be needed to fund the €600 million required between now and 2021, in addition to the other demands such as health and housing. If we say it will be a fully-funded State system and that will be the level of ambition we are talking about and we tell students and their parents that is what we are doing and then we do not put in the money or do not say to them that it will require an increase in taxation of X amount, because that is the scale of the funding we need, that is where the difficulty will arise.

In terms of access, as Senator Ruane rightly said, half the people at the moment have their fees paid for them, and we discovered that the big difficulty was in two areas. The first concerns those who are just over the threshold and who have enormous difficulties in paying the €3,000 but the second issue is the maintenance and grant system.

The maintenance and grant system needs to be radically reformed. In terms of policy and the political system, there are two or three reports knocking around on this issue but people have always backed off from doing it. If the option of a State-funded scheme is taken, something significant will have to be done on maintenance, perhaps by way of the tax system. If the second option of increasing State support while maintaining the €3,000 fee is taken, more will need to be done on the maintenance side to address the barrier of the €3,000 fee for low-income families. The income contingent loan option has all of the difficulties mentioned by members but it would allow for the retention of State investment in the system albeit in a different way. This would allow for reform of the maintenance system to ensure students of lower-income families can afford the cost of going to college. The reason some students are not going to college is because they cannot afford to do so.