Ms Kay Cullinane:

We have Department of Education and Skills statistics on this. Historically, 35,000 new applications were awarded every year. While we have 66,000 applicants, 35,000 will receive a new award this year. Based on the current trend, another 13,000 will be refused and as the chief executive officer pointed out, approximately 15,000 do not complete the grant application. We will still be looking at possibly 5,000 applications after Christmas. The majority will be applications we received after the closing date, which was approximately 10,000. We have provisionally assessed 5,000 of those and have moved them through the system and we will work on the remaining 5,000 as we move towards the end of the year and the start of the new year.