Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

No. On the whole I think it was changes of approach in how we fund institutions. I have appeared before the Committee of Public Accounts, although not in this particular session, on a number of occasions regarding Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI. We had a hearing on it two and half or three years ago. SUSI is operating very well. It is processing applications in line with its objectives. Obviously, it is very difficult to get that flow of information completely right, but it has been bringing back the time from which people can apply to as early as possible. It has been processing those quickly. Partly as a result of that, grants and fee payments are being processed more speedily.

The manner of releasing tranches of money to individuals was reviewed and revised and was brought forward a bit because of the pressures on individuals in the first term. It pays slightly higher amounts to individuals in the first term than it did previously.

Similarly, having regard to the financial position of the higher education institutions, the timing of payments to those has been revised a couple of times. We have tried different ways of doing that. We are trying to maximise the appropriate way to transfer money from SUSI to the institutions. We are particularly conscious of a few issues.

One is that not every recipient of student support completes his or her course. Particularly in first year, there is an issue about completing the first term. We have to be careful about that. Also, people want to have their grant protected so that if they attend only half of the first term, they have protection in place if they seek to commence another course. Issues such as that arise. It is a matter of making sure we have appropriate arrangements in place. There is a complex set of different arrangements that we put in place to bring that forward. Particularly in the context of the Supplementary Estimate, we brought forward the payments to institutions given that higher education is in a very tight funding position. We did not want to be under-funding from SUSI into the higher education sector. We wanted to make sure that we were funding appropriately.