Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We bailed out the banks to the tune of billions, as well as foreign bondholders who, frankly, did nothing for the country and were here just to exploit us and profiteer from us. We bailed them out, although we should not have. However, we do have an obligation to bail out foreign students who come here and who in good faith pay money for courses and then, because of our failure to properly regulate the English language school sector, are left high and dry. One Brazilian student said:

I do not even have €60 spare a month. How am I supposed to pay €60 a week? Am I supposed to starve? I have done nothing wrong and I am being punished.

That is what is happening. This is also an important sector for us not to allow reputational damage to be done to the country, never mind the injustice being visited on students. We should step in and bail them out. Judging from the briefing I received recently from EFL teachers, into which I do not have time to go, the EFL sector is an unregulated mess. That is a tragedy considering its huge potential if it was regulated properly. One big resource which does not cost us much to produce is our capacity to speak the English language. We should not waste it by allowing private schools and cowboys to wreck our reputation, leaving students high and dry and teachers in an awful position. The Minister should bail out the students, for their sake and the sake of our reputation.

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