Ms Annie Hoey:

Yes. I have scribbled my notes so I will jump from one thing to the other. The feeling we are getting from our members on the ground, and this is from talking to the Irish second-level students' union as well, is that in recent years Ireland has become a very cold country for young people. We still do not see a lot of hope for the future. When we hear people talking about placing the burden of loans around our necks it is not filling my members within the Union of Students in Ireland, or members of the Irish second-level students' union, with a lot of hope about the value that is being placed on young people and their contribution to society. We have taken an awful kicking in recent years and young people still feel they are being targeted while this debate is raging on. Young people are astonished because on the one hand they are told they are the reason companies are coming here to invest and they are the future, but on the other hand people are talking about loans, debt and fees for higher education.

Ireland prides itself on its education system and we were promised we would have an option to continue to higher education. However, we do not understand how or why this debate is occurring. Young people feel left out in the cold about how their futures are being discussed, planned and funded. We want to stay in this country and want to learn whether that will be through higher education, further education or vocational learning. We want to contribute to society. Some of us might like to go to Australia for a year or two, but that is entirely different to being chased out of a country because there is no place for us. Young people feel Ireland is becoming a cold place to live in and that they are not overly welcome.

Adult milestones were mentioned. The Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations did research beyond the impact of income contingent loans. We talk a lot about how such loans will not incentivise or disincentivise people from various backgrounds getting in. That is something we contest in our research, but in Australia they are looking at what happens beyond that. In discussing people's futures we cannot look just at how they will be funded for the next four years, then cut funding and off they go into the wilderness and hope for the best. A large amount of research is being done in Australia and New Zealand on the impact of income contingent loans, particularly around students' ability to save and buy a first home. It will have a knock-on effect on the property market, although I do not want to go off on that tangent here. It is, however, no secret that there is a rental crisis. In Australia there is clear evidence to show that young people with income contingent loans are not able to get out of the rental property market. They are stuck in the rental market for a long time, which obviously has knock-on effects.

There is also evidence showing that the number of 20 to 24-year-olds living at home has increased from 42% to 47%. The increase for 25 to 29-year-olds living at home has risen from 12% to 17%. A recent UK study showed that 40% of graduates of 2012 have had to return home as they cannot afford to live where they want to. This has a knock-on effect on where they can work, the kind of jobs they can get, their career opportunities and options for promotion. Some 47% of graduates having to return home is an enormous number of people who feel they cannot progress in society and make their desired contribution. They have outrageous debts hanging over their heads, which is a real concern of ours.

There is also some evidence concerning family planning. In Australia, young people with income contingent loans are putting off starting a family by an average of 3.3 years. We are also worried about that trend. I cannot believe I am sitting here as a student representative talking about family planning, but here we are. That is the reality concerning such adult milestones, including starting families. A delay of over three years will have a long-term impact in a couple of years time.

Questions were asked about funding higher education. The Cassels report was remiss in not properly teasing out the three options.

I understand that the committee perhaps felt it needed to lean down on one option but I think it is a large gap in the report. While we are students, not economists - perhaps some of us will be economists in the future - we have done preliminary research in regard to mapping. The Nevin Economic Research Institute, NERI, has done mapping of how it could potentially be funded in the future, and I have circulated that paper to the committee. I would encourage members to talk to the experts from NERI who wrote that paper and ask them to come in and present to the committee how this could be funded in the future.

There are various taxation models which are based not just on income taxation but include other levies and taxation, particularly in regard to the National Training Fund. We hear employers say they could not possibly get involved in another 0.1% increase whereas student fees have gone up by 350% in the last six years. When people say no one else can possibly afford it, we have afforded it. We have taken the burden of 350% over the past couple of years while the State decreased its investment and employers did not increase their investment. We have weathered the burden of the increase in the cost of higher education. Therefore, when talking about other groups and people increasing their contribution, and given we have increased our contribution by hundreds of per cent, I do not think it unreasonable for us to say it is high time other sources were looked at seriously.

With regard to public funding, as ideological as I am, I wish we could say it will happen in the next 12 months but it is not going to happen in the next 12 months. We are talking about a 14-year to 15-year plan being put in place, far beyond the lifetime of this Government and it may even be beyond a time when I am talking about having children that this plan is fully implemented. It is a 14-year plan to phase in publicly funded education in order to start moving towards a model we can be proud of. While I wish it could be done overnight, it cannot be.

With regard to where the maintenance system is failing, we made a presentation to the previous education committee on the SUSI maintenance grant and what we would like to see in the grant reform, and I am more than happy to circulate that paper. We found a lot of gaps in the grant reform and some people were slipping through, such as parents and independent students. Estranged students were having huge difficulties in being able to prove estrangement. A member of the USI executive was the person who brought that through and that person really struggled in being able to prove estrangement from their family, and had to go through never-ending hoops, jumps and loops to try to prove that. If people want to prove estrangement, they need their parents to prove they are estranged from them, which is a little difficult when they are estranged from them. Some people are slipping through these gaps in the SUSI grant system and those are the ones targeted in the national access plan. We would see those as being the severe problems. There is then the issue of people who are just above the thresholds and also issues such as the distance from college. For example, to have people living on the Aran Islands considered as being adjacent is mad. These are small things but they have very negative long-term impacts on the students they affect and their families.

There was a question about how to convince people this is not a loan as we know it. I do not necessarily know this is something that can be done. We have been talking to students and they are recoiling in horror not because we have not explained to them what an income-contingent loan is, but because they understand what it is and they understand what debt is. We are the generation who for the last eight years watched our parents be ravaged by the recession. Some of our parents lost their jobs and some of us had to move from our homes and schools. Some of us have watched our parents struggle to put food on the table. We know exactly what it is like to be faced with debt and with loans. I am not entirely sure, particularly with this generation, that there will be a way to convince us this loan is any different to any other kind of loan. Many of us are brought up, as Ms Hayes-Nally said, to pay back loans and to pay back what we borrow. Telling us we will not have to pay it back is a somewhat misguided financial approach.

Before student debt is considered as a policy solution for inadequate public investment in higher education, the wider social and economic impact of this debt should be considered and monitored. I would like to see some proper mapping of options 1 and 2 in regard to how they could be realised so the committee can make a fully informed decision about what the various options are, whether there needs to be a combination and how best we can move forward. As I said, it is over 14 years. We wish there was a magic wand but there is not. We are talking about a 14-year investment in higher education, although all of us will be gone from this debate at that time.