Averil Power (Fianna Fail)
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The difficulty is that they both come out of the same pot. The money going to the student assistance fund has decreased from €8 million to €6.6 million in the past two years. I understand that the overall fund is the same, but more is going to the disabilities side. The students who can avail of the student assistance fund are our most vulnerable students. They have to be in extreme financial hardship, so they are even more vulnerable than the other cohort we are talking about today, who get maintenance grants. These students are a sub-group of that and a group whose members are often in such dire circumstances that a few hundred euro or a thousand euro might be the difference between them staying in college and dropping out. If they drop out of college, they end up on social welfare. They end up on a demand-led scheme, where the State is perfectly happy to pay them the dole, week in, week out, and will find the money to do so, but in the third level system, when there is not enough money in the student assistance fund, we are telling them that we cannot help them. The reality is that half the colleges had exhausted their allocation by the end of December.

Last week in the Seanad I stated eight had used 100% and another six or seven had used 80% of their allocation, and that is for a student year that started only in September or October. Perhaps within two and a half months of starting the student year, the affected students had no money. From the colleges' point of view, that means that if somebody turns up on 1 January or 1 March, he or she cannot be helped. This is problematic.

I accept the statement that the overall funding is the same, but the colleges have a responsibility to students with disabilities also. It is not fair to pit one against the other. The colleges probably have a stronger statutory responsibility to students with disabilities, which means they should get priority within the pot. However, the lesson is that the overall pot needs to be increased. The allocation has decreased significantly by comparison with a few years ago. In recent years when the fund was exhausted at an early date, top-ups were provided. This needs to be considered. It strikes me as irrational that we would let somebody drop out of education and then pay him several times over to be on the dole when, for the sake of a small amount of money, he could be kept in college, as he desires, to get a third level education and improve his prospects so he will, it is hoped, never end up as a customer of the Department of Social Protection.