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

There is nothing facile about my analysis of the funding of third level education. This analysis was provided by the Irish Universities Association. Its authors are academics so I think the Taoiseach should take them a bit more seriously rather than just trying to score political points. The analysis points out that we are spending a small fraction of what most other European countries are spending per student. The Taoiseach's comparison with health is facile because it fails to acknowledge that quite a considerable amount of that expenditure is out of pocket expenditure by people paying accident and emergency charges, overnight bed charges, and prescription charges. That is all included in the expenditure as is, for that matter, private health insurance. Public funding of health is a very different matter but we are talking about universities. The point is we are way down the league table and our universities are now tumbling in the international rankings. The Irish Universities Association, to say nothing of the students' unions, says that there is a very serious problem. I would have thought that the Taoiseach should acknowledge that as an issue and seek to respond to it in a sensible way.

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