Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Joyce, Ms Joyce and Ms Reilly. I was not on this committee the last time around and I am learning a lot from their contributions. It is clear to me that, as Ms Joyce stated, the system needs to look at itself. That is the major message from today. We need to examine the reasons why the previous strategy was not implemented, and who is responsible for that and why. There is a new strategy despite there being an implementation deficit, which cannot be allowed to happen again.

I congratulate Ms Reilly on her first class honours degree and Mr. David Joyce on his first class honours master's degree. It is a fantastic achievement.

I will ask a couple of questions and the witnesses can answer them. Was one significant thing different for Ms Reilly in enabling her to reach her potential as she has done so far? I am not sure what her plans are for the future. Did one thing make a difference, be it a teacher or school? What was it?

My area of interest is higher education, in particular.

In response to a question I asked of the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, he informed me there were 48 new entrants of students to higher education who identified themselves as Travellers in the 2019-20 academic year. That is significantly below the target of 80 new entrants set in the national access plan in 2015. That document states the number of Travellers progressing to third level was so low they used numbers rather than percentage figures. The target was to go from 35 to 80 over the lifetime of that plan, which has now finished. Given the Department is in the process of forming a new national access plan, what should those targets be? Ms Joyce might respond to that question. Why have we fallen so short of reaching the last very modest target? Ms Joyce, in the opening statement she provided, stated "to ensure full access to education and lifelong learning, grants should be made available to all Traveller students". Will she elaborate on that and provide further detail on why she thinks the means-tested Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, grants are not working for Traveller students? I have more questions but Ms Joyce might answer those questions first.