Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

Yes, and there is a good historical reason as to why that is the case. I will come back to some of the points made by Deputy Brian Hayes with regard to the dropout rates among people coming from backgrounds where there is no culture of third level education. In the smallest of farms in the most barren places of the west and rural Ireland, there was a value put on and a sustained support for education because it was recognised for what it was, and people were sustained in staying in college no matter how alien it might have appeared to somebody coming from a rural area 15 or 20 years ago. Coming from the centre of Ringsend, it is much more frightening to travel the 3 km to UCD than it is to travel 65 km to Galway, Sligo or wherever else.

As I said, the number of bodies has been reduced to 33. The VECs will take over the awarding of all grants while the local authorities lose the role they hitherto had in administering the scheme. Has some section of this non-joined up Government calculated the impact of this measure in terms of the staff release to the local authorities and what will be the bonus and benefit of this measure? Effectively, the Minister is now reducing the administrative staff by 50% to administer in principle the same number of grants.

Another provision of the Bill is the quality control check. The Minister can order a review of an awarding authority's performance in terms of effectively issuing grants or implementing other parts of the Act. The Minister can also order an awarding authority to lose its power to issue grants for two years as punishment. God love the person who wrote that. If the same degree of courage is exercised by civil servants in regard to performance-related pay awards at middle management level in the Civil Service, as displayed in regard to this issue, we will never see a VEC sanctioned or punished for failure to perform. The backbenchers in Fianna Fáil or of whatever party is in office will be the first to say one cannot take these powers away from the local VEC and that they could not afford to lose it. I recall the kind of political muscle exercised by the VECs in regard to the Education Bill 1996 that became the Education Act 1998. The Leas-Cheann Comhairle might have some memories of that battle himself.

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