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

I will take a scattergun approach here because I have a number of points I want to raise. I will start with the last of them. The Minister referred to the debate we have on the pension every year. I disagree with him. I would prefer if we did not have a debate on the pension each year and it was instead benchmarked so that we have certainty about the future and are sure it is keeping pace with the rapidly changing cost of living. All of the figures here are welcome. We need to disambiguate between what the different pots of money are doing. There tends to be conflation in the public consciousness. Some €307 million is for core funding. It is about driving research and student-teacher ratios. We have €450 million in capital funding. There is a pot of money for technological university research, which is extremely important. The Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth, was in the Walton Institute with me on Friday. We saw a range of extremely exciting research. The difficulty for staff working in the technological university and the balance of teaching hours versus research hours, which makes it difficult for them to compete directly with the university sector, was discussed. We might need to work on that.

I have heard clear figures about capital funding and capital. I am not really hearing figures about how we tackle the costs for the student and the end user. That is important and we need to have a discussion. The Minister talked about the two levers available to him. We need to discuss how we balance universal interventions with more targeted interventions. In this context, we see the SUSI grant as being more targeted and the reduction of fees as being more universal. We need to have a proper public discussion about which way we want to go.

On the bigger picture, we have repeatedly heard about how Ireland spends a lower percentage of its GDP on higher education than other OECD countries, in particular. I know GDP is a frothy figure in Ireland so we might prefer to use GNI or GNI*. We do not compare favourably with other OECD countries. I would be interested in hearing about the Minister's vision and the global overview. Do we intend to shift the needle on that percentage spend? We need to have that conversation openly and publicly.

If we are raising tax, we have a responsibility to talk to the public about how that tax will be spent and explain the decision-making behind it. I am glad we have turned our face against student borrowing. We heard different points of view during this unit of work we are doing on student borrowing. I think student borrowing would present a mountain to climb for families from particular socioeconomic groups, so I am glad that the Minister has set his face against it.

Those are the things I would like the Minister to dig down into. What specifically are we talking about in terms of funding that we think is going to get to the student?

In terms of tackling the cost of living, I accept the changes that have been made to SUSI grants in terms of eligibility, adjacency etc. All of those things are very important but I think we would all accept those are running to stand still in terms of chasing the cost of living. I would like to hear from the Minister what it is in particular and specifically we want to do to tackle that cost.