Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

This education fund is worth €12.7 million. It is a substantial amount of money and it should go a long way to meeting the educational needs of the survivors and their families. The needs of each individual will be different so it would be wrong to specify in a narrow fashion which courses should be funded. The independent board will publish the criteria for the payment of grants and make information available on the range of educational services for which grants will be payable. However, if it is too prescriptive we may end up excluding people again. On Committee Stage, I gave the example of the person who got a grant to take driving lessons. That provided the person access to employment and so on. One might not think of driving lessons as an educational opportunity, but it may well have been the education that such a person needed to enable him or her to get a new opportunity in life.

The independent board will take on board each application and the needs of the individual. With that amount of money, the board should be able to meet a wide variety of needs. People have done traditional educational courses, but they have also done counselling courses, career training courses, pilot training and so on. The scheme should be flexible enough to allow for that kind of course to be taken.

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