Mr. Jim Miley:

I am grateful for the opportunity to appear today. It has been a very useful discussion overall. This issue is very close to my heart. I got a grant to go to college; I know what this is about. On the person the Chairman referred to who had a life opportunity because of an intervention he made, the story is encouraging but it is also frustrating that the intervention had to happen. I will go back to the point I made earlier. The needs analysis is absolutely critical to this. I do not go with the open-ended chequebook that opens the door to everyone. We have to be sensible and pragmatic. Coming in here with our proposals, we try to be that. We recognise that there is and always will be a limited budget available to the system. We have to change the rules.

There are some people going to college at the moment who are not getting enough support. There are others who are not able to go at all because they are not able to access the supports. The Chairman has illustrated one example of that. There have been some changes to SUSI in the more recent budget, introduced by the Minister, Deputy Harris. They are welcome but I do not think they will go far enough. This relates back to the student contribution issue. Our members have no opposition to a political decision being taken to reduce student contributions overall. The question we would ask is whether it is appropriate, just or fair that a person from a family that can afford to pay whatever level of fee - €1,000, €2,000, €3,000 or more - gets a free ride while somebody cannot afford at all to go to college cannot be supported. In our view there is only one answer to that question. We have to have a more refined needs analysis within the SUSI system. It is too crude at the moment.