Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The medical cards fiasco earlier in the year should have served as an advance warning with regard to the operation of SUSI. Many of us linked the two of them together at the time. The reality is that we are poor at putting good institutional architecture together when we need to reform things. The main reason is that a raft of reforms tends to be needed as a consequence of the continual postponing of reform. The reality is that the administration of a grant scheme is always most difficult in the first year of a degree course. In my experience, it is quite easy once it has been done in the first year. The odd case might differ in the years after that. This has been an annual problem, mainly because the administration of a large volume of grants has to be shoehorned into a short period of time each year. I suggest we could do things better, perhaps by organising the system over a much longer period of time so grants could be cleared from January onwards.

I am particularly worried about the effect of these difficulties on certain students. One often encounters cases of students who start a certain degree course only to discover that they would prefer to change to a course that is very different from the course they are doing. If such a student changes his or her degree course early enough in first year, he or she will not be penalised for the change. In the current circumstances, however, some students are likely to drop out at a sufficiently late stage to be counted as having studied for a full year. The difficulty for such students is that they will be required to pay the full-year fee the following year, which might put it beyond their ability to do a degree in future. We do not even know what changes in this regard might be in store in next month's budget. We need to give serious consideration to how such people might be assisted.

I would like to call for a proper debriefing on what went wrong in this instance. That will help us to learn from the mistakes that have been made in this case, as well as in the case of the medical cards fiasco, when we are centralising other systems in the future. Those of us who are in opposition usually have to spend weeks highlighting these issues before they are acknowledged by the Government. I do not want to have to do that with another fiasco of this nature. We need to learn from what has happened on this occasion.

See this speech in context