Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I noted the Deputy's statement last week, when she rightly put it to me in a very reasonable and constructive way to provide places and ensure every student who was wrongly downgraded by the calculated grades error got a place. They did. Maybe we would have a different conversation if they did not.

The Deputy is making a point that is not unreasonable, which is that some students got an upgrade. The very honest view was delivered by the chief inspector at last week's press conference at Marlborough Street, which was that we have a long-standing precedent in this country, which is decades old, that nobody gets downgraded. Short of rerunning the entire process, which nobody would advocate, there is no way of determining the impact.

The Government, in a pandemic, thought this to be the fairest system. Is it perfect? No. I am encouraged, however, that more people than ever before got places and more people got their first choice. With the latest error that we had to deal with, and to which we do not expect to have to respond, we still managed to get everybody in. There is a precedent that a person cannot be downgraded.