Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

At the outset, I wish to recap precisely what the experience with SUSI has been. In the past year, more than half or approximately 20,000 students did not get paid their first grant instalment until the new year. Parents and families have experienced exceptional hardship in a difficult time with the single biggest cause of hardship being the mishandling by the Minister and his Department of the nationalisation and centralisation of the system for administering grants. In addition, the Government has claimed repeatedly throughout that process that the students were at fault by not providing documentation. This was the standard response to which they were obliged to listen whenever they came up against the wall of not getting an answer regarding their grant applications.

The current position, after examinations are finished, is that almost 500 students remain within the appeals system and 133 students still await a decision. In many such cases, these students are having difficulty in accessing the examination results. I will provide the Minister with one particular example, in which a postgraduate student was not able to access either the examination result or the college facilities to complete the dissertation. This is the type of grief students have been obliged to experience this year as a result of the difficult situation they have encountered.

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