Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I, with others, welcome this Bill, for which we have waited five years since the original study on supporting equality of access to higher education was published in 2003. In welcoming the Bill, I feel there are ways in which it can be improved and fine-tuned on Committee Stage. These include, for example, responding to the representations of students on the phasing of payments, that is, paying a greater proportion of the grant at the beginning of the year when the costs and expenses are at their highest.

One needs to look at the method of transfer of payments to students through the banking system. While I do not have the time to dwell on this, I felt that in the past banks have abused their relationship with students by, for example, using the names and addresses of students to send them pre-approved loans that had not been sought. That was a disgraceful abuse of the relationship between a bank and students.

In regard to the entire bureaucracy, there will be strong support for what was and is Labour Party policy that it would have been better to have one centralised unit, perhaps through the Department of Social and Family Affairs, which could have, with efficiency, answered all the questions about income and dependency probably better and with more staff than other units. In regard to the appeals board, it is important that people from the students organisation are represented on that body. That would only be reasonable.

I want to use this opportunity to reply to some myths that I think are extraordinarily dangerous in Ireland. I read a recent economics book which suggested that the abolition of fees had not had much of an impact on reducing social inequality. This statement is factually wrong. It is also incredibly dangerous in relation to the way people think.

I was a member of the Cabinet, along with my colleague, Niamh Bhreathnach, that took the decision to abolish fees. It was an inspired decision as was the decision a long time ago of Donough O'Malley to allow access to second level education. At the time Niamh Bhreathnach was making her proposal and being opposed on it, people suggested it was not a progressive measure. The reality was that the highly literate and well-heeled who were opposing her were people who could have back to back covenants between each other, which were allowed at the time, and effectively have the equivalent of the abolition of fees in their little ingenious tax arrangements with each other. There were many people who had that arrangement. Unfortunately, the recent comments and the earlier comments about the effect of removing fees does not square with the published research.

This issue was studied in England after 2005 when the fee system was changed. It shows there has been a drop of just under 2% of people from the lower socio-economic groups participating in further education. As well as that, a more recent study, which was referred to in the BBC News on 21 June 2006, was done on 10,000 teenagers, 7,277 of whom replied. Just over a quarter, 27%, said tuition fees made it less likely that they would go university.

I was a university teacher in Ireland and, briefly, in the United States. Putting third level education on the horizon of children is incredibly important. One cannot judge the effect of removing fees in a five year period or in a particular year. The issue is whether it is on the horizon of expectation of a child. A young child will say he or she wants to be a teacher, engineer, doctor or whatever. Those people who opposed the removal of fees simply did not allow for that kind of thinking. The effect of removing fees has to be judged over a longer period. Studies have shown that the removal of fees has lifted expectations.

I turn to another group who are very important. It is time the nonsense of assuming that if one had not used one's opportunities by the age of 18 years, one had lost them for life. Commitment to life-long education is a matter of rights. I remember people coming back to education. Let me offer an interesting fact from my own experience. I was teaching for nearly 20 years. If students who came to third level got as far as Christmas in the first year, they actually made it. That is crucial period when they are making a transition either from the world of work or from second level into a new and often different and strange setting. It is at that level, in the first term of the first year, that the greatest amount of counselling and support is required.

The Minister of State shares a constituency in County Galway with me. Later I will raise another matter on the Adjournment concerning mothers in education. There are 60 mothers who are facing the closure of their scheme of funding. Since 2004, more than 200 mothers have gone through a scheme, one of whom is doing a PhD, evidence of which I heard on Saturday last. Another has finished a Masters degree and so forth. The interesting aspect is that if one allows young married mothers, young mothers under the age of 25 and poor people, to have access to education, one raises not only their expectations, their employability and their income, but also the expectations that will prevail in the family. Bad economics, poorly researched, that looks at the notion of whether the change has happened in a year or two years is nonsense.

There is a right wing view that perhaps there should be loans. In the United States, most people who leave third level carry with them a debt that is greater than the average mortgage in Ireland. If some want to suggest this is reasonable, I ask them to consider the situation in New Zealand and Australia, where many New Zealand graduates emigrate to Australia to get out of the debt they have acquired in the New Zealand system. We must accept that participation in education is no longer a luxury but a necessity for one's full development and participation in society. We must move towards trying to establish as much universal access as we can.

In the time remaining, I would like to outline a personal view. I was horrified a year or two ago to hear the heads of universities — perhaps they needed to say this to promote a pay claim — suggest they were not so much heads of universities as CEOs of corporations. On another occasion, I hope I will have an opportunity to outline what I believe is happening in the universities, in particular in the area with which I am most familiar. I believe the quality of academic work is degraded by an imposed neo-functionalism.

I went to university at 21 years of age and was the only member of my family who had that opportunity. I respect what a university is. One should not judge a staff member only by the amount of money he or she brings into a college. Staff should be assessed in terms of their ability to be a good teacher, to be able to inspire students, to get along with colleagues, to work as part of a research foundation or undertaking a piece of research that may not yield results for ten years.

It is interesting what has happened in this regard at Oxford and Cambridge. Some of the drug companies, driven by shareholder expectations, have, by requiring that a product must reach the market within a period of three or four years, caused the demolition of some of the finest research groups for the simple reason that the leaders of the research groups wanted a longer time period. I am not making a case for inefficiency with regard to academic work but that one can destroy academic work by a stupid interference.

Turning to the Bill, it is important that we eliminate as much of the bureaucracy as possible. It will be necessary to increase the numbers of staff working in VECs if they are to expeditiously deal with their new functions. In addition, it is nonsense to suggest one would have to wait 45 days for an appeal. It should be possible to do this faster.

I often think of the time Members of the Dáil and Seanad waste in writing meaningless letters about appeals processes that are long, stupid and cumbersome. I would prefer if some Department considered the cost of all this. I strongly suspect that if 10% or 15% of all the claims in all the different appeals systems were bogus, it would cost less than the bureaucracy we are operating at present. We need to make systems simple, we need to make our processes faster and we need to make the representation on the appeals board genuinely representative.

As the Minister of State, Deputy Michael Kitt, is aware, certain subjects are not treated fairly in terms of the position of postgraduates. For example, if one wanted to take a doctorate in philosophy, one would not get additional funding but if one enrolled for a higher diploma in education, one would. These are absurd contradictions. Many Deputies have referred to the cumbersome nature of the residence requirements.

I will conclude by referring to a tragic aspect of the Bill which I hope will be amended, namely, the position of migrants and refugees. I remember meeting the young representative of a group of unaccompanied minors in the charge of the former Eastern Health Board, who got the leaving certificate and immediately qualified for deportation. Even if that youngster had stayed in Ireland, he could never enter third level education because he would not have residency for three years. There is some capacity for discretion in the Bill and I hope it will be expanded on Committee Stage.

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