Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

The announcement in budget 2012 that the value of certain capital assets would be taken into account in the assessment of means for student grants has caused concern to many self employed people, particularly land owners and farmers. It would be absolutely wrong to include productive assets in the means assessment. Such a system would discriminate against self employed people, including farmers. Does the Minister agree that those productive assets are required by the self employed to generate an income and that the inclusion of such assets would be discriminatory and would deny access to higher education for many students from low income families who are self employed, including the farming community?

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