Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Deputy's comments and I am broadly in agreement with the thrust of them. The peace process must be constantly nurtured, embedded and deepened. Cross-Border student exchange in terms of people from the South going to study and live in the North and vice versa is one of the ways of doing that. Sadly, while the number of applicants from the North to colleges in South has increased by more than 40%, as I am informed from my briefing note, although the numbers are still very low, Northern Ireland accounted for less than 2%, 1.7% to be specific, of all CAO applications.

There are issues, as I indicated in an earlier reply, about the equivalent value of a GCSE qualification as against our leaving certificate subject qualifications. I am happy to open a discussion on it. We could list it as a topic for discussion with the IUA, or the committee may well do that, but that is their system. While my predecessor, Mary Coughlan, persuaded the CAO to award an extra 25 bonus points for honours level mathematics, there is no indication that they are prepared to make an equivalent value for the Northern Irish leaving certificate system as against our own.

See this speech in context