Dr. Niamh Hourigan:

I want to respond to a number of issues raised by several members. A member asked if the maintenance grant was a particular issue. I would have a concern that the maintenance grant is being treated as a monolith. Within that, the question of accommodation is a massive source of tension and a problem for students, international students, new staff and that particular strata of staff who are more precarious, which the member and Senator Ó Clochartaigh highlighted. There is a link here to infrastructure because the universities can go a long way to providing accommodation. That is a nettle that will have to be grasped.

On the issue of career guidance, something that comes across clearly from the limited research we have is that middle class students whose parents have been through university are fairly well equipped to negotiate the transition from second level to third level. The cohort of students who are suffering from the career guidance cuts is that cohort whose parents have not been through university and who, with the best will in the world, struggle to negotiate. They are the group more likely to make decisions that are not the best fit.

On the issue of emigration, I have a slight concern in terms of the report because it leans so much on the Australian model. The Australian dynamic of emigration is quite different from ours in the sense that for many young people in Australia, emigration is part of the life course. In many cases, when they leave college they live abroad for a couple of years and then return for family formation, as Dr. Doris mentioned. As Ireland is located in a completely different part of the world, our emigration patterns tend to be much more strongly influenced by push and pull factors related to our economy. For instance, if we consider the early stages of the Celtic tiger boom, much of that was generated by graduates who had left in the 1980s and came back in the 1990s.

Peter Cassells said this morning that his report is not a technical report. I would say, as a social scientist, that we need a technical report because there is the issue of how income contingent loans will impact on people's capacity to access housing, particularly in terms of the debates we have just seen about Central Bank rules, and also in terms of saving for pensions. We have a looming pensions crisis. Some 30% of people in the United States are still paying back student loans when they hit retirement.