Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

Deputy O'Sullivan has hit the nail on the head. We have asked them to indicate whether these will be additional places because it is not quite clear. To be honest, I doubt that they are additional because I am sure those already included in the 590 are people who would have medical cards. The medical card alone is too narrow a criterion because the way it works is that other indicators are considered, including family income, parental occupation and parental education levels, which are equally valuable in determining whether somebody is at an educational disadvantage as opposed to a medical disadvantage, which is the position in the case of the medical card. That is the reason all those elements must be examined. We must ensure we can increase the number of people from those backgrounds getting into third level education and not have universities or the institutes, which I know are working from a good motivation, come up with a scheme that would only allow us the same number of students in the system.

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