Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 22 February 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

Future Funding of Higher Education: Discussion

Photo of Marc Ó CathasaighMarc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I have a number of questions to put and they are a little bit all over the map, so I will keep my prefacing comments to a minimum. I echo what Senator Malcolm Byrne said earlier in welcoming the appointment of Patrick Prendergast to the board of the governing authority in what will now be the South East Technological University, SETU. It is a clear indication of the ambition for that institution to have somebody of that calibre. I also welcome the Minister's appointment of Jim Bergin and Ruth Beadle.

I find myself at variance with Professor Hegarty's position on the provision of loans. We can consider the social and cultural capital for someone from Dublin 10 versus someone from Dublin 6. It may be very easy for somebody from Dublin 6 to take that level of debt on board to participate in third level education, but that will not be true of somebody in Dublin 10. I come at that from a personal point of view. My generation is the first in my family to access third level education. Had that bar been raised in front of us, I am not sure if we would have cleared it.

I have some questions for Mr. Miley. I suspect I may know the answer to this already. He made a comparison based on relative funding and he referenced GNI* when he mentioned 0.6%. I want to make sure we are comparing like with like. Because of our frothy GDP figures, we tend to use GNI*. Are we on a firm footing when we are comparing GDP figures in other countries with GNI*? Are we comparing like with like in that?

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