Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I take the point and I understand it. The point the Deputy makes is correct. My experience of student leaders has been that they rightly do their job to agitate and to advocate but when it comes to public health, they have shown extraordinary leadership. In the conversations I have had to have with those in the Union of Students in Ireland, USI, they have never been anything more than proactive in wanting to protect the safety of everybody. In fact, the people I found who were most annoyed and angry with those who were acting the tool were other students. As Senator Mullen acknowledged too, it is not all students; far from it. One feels let down by one's peers when some go astray in that regard. The campaign, Keep it Small, Keep it Safe, Keep your Distance, is good solid public health advice. More important, it does not matter what I think. The Chief Medical Officer thinks it is really good advice for students to socialise like that by keeping it small and keeping their distance.

On SUSI, I take the points. One could equally make the points, and I am sure the Deputy will, about adjacency and about the fact that we tell people to do part-time courses and do not provide support and that we tell people to go back to education and we do not take crèche fees into consideration. I accept there are serious limitations with the current Act and the support scheme. The programme for Government commits to a review. I would hope to get that review under way quickly and I hope it can be meaningful. When we have that review, I would welcome the input of this committee. We must be honest about what we can achieve and the pace at which we can achieve it but I would not mind an understanding from the committee in a sequencing sense of what it thinks are the most important issues.

On the issue of precarious employment, I, too, have an initial concern about this from what I am hearing. In recent days, I asked my Department for a paper on the employment status of people in research, precarious employment and how we try to get on top of it. I would be happy to engage with this committee on that again.