Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I take the points made by the Deputies that 27,000 applications are outstanding and should be expedited. An additional 20 staff members are processing the documentation received from students, and extra staff have also been assigned to SUSI head office to work on continually improving the processes and speeding up processing times. I ask for common sense to deal with this calmly and rationally, not to seek to score political points. The system will change and, unless the Deputy opposite is saying we should unravel the system and go back to the 66 local authorities, we should continue to improve the system. That is what we are doing.

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