Mr. Lewis Purser:

There is a slight difference between someone who has grown up in Belfast and lived his or her entire life there and someone who has grown up in Chicago, even if both of them hold the same passport. It is up to the Government to decide who is eligible for EU fees and who is eligible for Irish Government support. We would be thrilled to have more students with Irish heritage coming from the United States. The reality, however, is that our current students are already underfunded. If we opened the gates to all Irish passport holders, what would be the cumulative effects on the system? The position with regard to giving people the right to vote domestically is similar. It would be wonderful to have a system that was so generous that we could offer heavily subsidised education to everybody but we are having difficulty meeting the demands and needs of the domestic population. Currently, we cannot legally distinguish between an Irish citizen and, for example, a Swedish citizen who wishes to study in Ireland. That is normal. We are considering theoretically how we would treat a citizen who has lived all his or her life in the North or in Scotland and comes here as a student. De facto, post Brexit such students will be from a non-EU jurisdiction but will have lived in part of the EU for most of their lives. I do not know whether we can differentiate on that basis.