Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I take the point the Deputy has made. In an ideal world this is an area I would like to move on. I am constrained by the decision that we made to hinge this on the free fees initiative. I must be honest; a number of students fell outside the qualifying criteria, namely, students attending private colleges or colleges that do not qualify for free fees or who repeated a year in the same course or a different one.

It is a thread that if I pull has more budgetary consequences than one might think looking initially at any one measure in isolation. It is something I will keep under review through the course of the year. Last year there were some underspends in SUSI and the like. If there are measures I can take later in the year, I will certainly consider that. We will make sure all of the funding allocated to assist students is spent and there if room to address this later in the year it is something I will keep under review.

We will publish a cost of education paper a lot earlier this year than we did last year in advance of the budget on the further options we can take to reduce the cost of education. We can tease through these issues then.

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