Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I apologise to the House and the Minister for not being present when the Bill arrived a bit sooner than all of us had anticipated. I was at another meeting at the time.

While the Bill is clearly overdue, it is nonetheless very welcome and is particularly to be welcomed by the people who will be directly affected by it, the 56,000 students and their parents and families. In many cases, they have had to carry the burden of subsidising or providing bridging loans or advance cash payments because of the delay in the way the system functions.

At the outset I wish to put some matters in context. The Minister very generously, courageously and correctly recognised the wisdom and foresight of Donough O'Malley in abolishing second level fees in 1967, without reference, it should be said, to the Department of Finance, as the history now shows. She could have continued that spirit of generosity in recognising a former constituency colleague of hers, Niamh Bhreathnach, who did precisely the same for third level fees, but this time with the full support and enthusiastic encouragement of the then Minister for Finance, who happened to be myself.

The Minister may recall the measure was criticised at the time as not being equitable and one which would not improve access to universities. The Minister's figures indicate this is not the case. Equity in access to third level education probably begins at pre-school level. All the indications suggest that children getting those two or three extra years from age three to five, and then getting a supportive environment at home, where learning to read transforms itself into reading to learn and takes off from the age of 12 or so, will perform better.

This morning I attended the conference which the Minister attended this afternoon. The presentations from the National Education Welfare Board indicated that by the time many students get to transition year and have gone through the junior certificate, their path in terms of participation in third level education is pretty well determined. The consensus of the excellent and professional contributions made by a Canadian and two English contributors were that Ireland's 20% dropout rate, or rate of failure to continue to participate, is, on the scale of the PISA analysis, a reasonably acceptable one. It is not acceptable to us as we can all do better but in comparison to many other countries with a longer tradition and a stronger economy going back in history, our position is quite good.

With a 20% dropout rate occurring in second year or third year, the issue of free fees for third level students was never about access in the first instance but about equity, given that some parents could fiddle their accounts and get grants, or afford to pay fees in one way or another, or leverage their independent wealth or wealth from the family business or farm, and ensure they could afford the fees for their children to go to college and the support required after that. Secondary school fees were, by today's standards, a fraction of what they are now for those 56 schools that still have them because the Christian Brothers and the teaching orders, male and female, by and large gave us free management, time and 24-7 cover in the schools, which the Department of Finance and the Department of Education and Science never factored in. This is one of the reasons the voluntary free sector is now having difficulties in regard to its financing.

Before we move on to discuss the grants support system for third level students who qualify, it is essential from my perspective that the role of the Labour Party, in particular Niamh Bhreathnach, would be recognised in the same spirit as that of Donough O'Malley.

The Bill has been a long time coming. From reading it and listening to the Minister's exposition, it reeks of a God almighty turf war between the Department of Education and Science, the local authorities and the VECs, and a certain belt and braces approach with regard to giving herself a double-barrel shotgun if some VECs do not perform. The Bill proposes a unified grants system and elimination of the three different types of grants for various courses. It also proposes that the number of awarding bodies be halved from 66 to 33, which is still an enormous figure for a country this size. When one considers these bodies are related to counties and not divided by the population, this means there is one awarding body for the whole of County Leitrim and all its 28,000 souls. How many of them will qualify to go to third level education and how many will apply for grants, although I suppose in the old days they all would have applied for grants?

See this speech in context