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

Covid-19 has forced us to rethink many of our priorities and understand what is important. Many of those things that we have learned the importance of during Covid-19, and which we should have known before, start with higher education. There are the doctors, the nurses and the scientists we need to cope with a health crisis, the engineers, the architects and the apprentices we need to build infrastructure and the houses we so desperately need, and the arts and the humanities without which, frankly, we would all have gone off our heads over the past six months. Yet, even before Covid, we were failing desperately to support and invest in the people who study these things at third level and postgraduate level. We have the highest fees in Europe, now that Britain has gone, with accommodation costs absolutely out of control for students and a straightforward lack of affordable accommodation, or any accommodation, for students. We had grants that were woefully inadequate and huge inequality in terms of access to third level, given 90% of people from Dublin 6 go to university while the figure is well under 20% in many working-class areas.

If all of that was true before Covid, frankly, it has got worse since then because students now do not have the opportunities to work they might have had in order to supplement their income. It is also true of postgraduate students who get paid nothing at all and who, even though they are key to delivering a research output in our universities, do not have proper contracts of employment. Student nurses, who are literally holding the front line together, as many of the nurses, doctors and healthcare assistants are out sick with Covid, are being paid nothing now. Having been acknowledged with healthcare assistant, HCA, payment for a couple of months, it was then pulled from them and the Government is resisting paying them.

Some €250 is a drop in the ocean in that situation. There is no justification for fees and there never was. There is even less justification in the context of blended learning, with most of it happening off campus amidst general uncertainty. Fees for international students are absolutely outrageous, student nurses actually have to pay fees, when they should be paid and not have to pay fees, and postgraduate students are not paid, even though they are doing real work in real jobs. A hell of a lot needs to be done to change the situation for our students and postgraduates and in regard to the proper funding of universities.

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