Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Progress had been made and now society, but in particular the Government, is undoing the good work that had been done. That will have dire consequences unless it is addressed. There are a number of reasons for the decline in the number of people from lower income socioeconomic groups going to college. One reason is less disposable income. The statistics bear that out. The Minister of State referred to students from the socioeconomic category of non-skilled or manual being less likely to go to university. In some cases it is due to lack of hope and the desire to emigrate. Traveller groups and the long-term unemployed are other groups of concern in that regard.

Representation was made to me by a 21 year old woman who is going into her third year in college. She will be totally dependent for the duration of the summer on her parents who are unemployed. She has no access to any income. The difficulty she faces is trying to survive and to hold on to go back to college. She is from Ballyfermot, one of the areas that has had the lowest third level attainment for many years, and the cycle there was starting to be broken. She is trying to find a solution. The maintenance grant stops at the end of the university term. There is no encouragement for her other than the desire to continue to educate herself. She must try, like everyone else who is unemployed, to find a job. Some method must be found to address the competing demands on a young woman such as I outlined whose course of study would benefit community and society in terms of preventative therapies for children at risk, to which I referred earlier, and to help combat suicide. She was wondering whether she could afford to go back to college because she will have to spend three if not four months without any income. That is an illustration of the competing demands. In the past, at least one parent in a household might have been working and could have sustained a student during the summer, but the more the Government cuts, the less disposable income is available to families and the more likely it is that there will be a greater degree of drop-out from people among that cohort in society who are unemployed or in disadvantaged communities. Does the Minister of State have statistics on the number of students who drop out of college and their socioeconomic breakdown?

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