Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I cannot understand how Government TDs, including those who represent my county, are allowing this to happen. They have to be seeing the same families and talking to the same people about how much their rent has increased, how they cannot afford it and how families are absolutely crippled with the rises in rents they are being asked to pay. It is atrocious. I welcome the fact that there is rent relief for student accommodation but the refundable tax credits cannot be claimed for students who are forced to go abroad. They have to get accommodation. The money for the accommodation is coming out of the same basket - out of the household - for really hard working families who pay their tax in this State. Their son or daughter is forced to go abroad because we cannot provide an education place for them to do courses that we desperately need them to do in our health workforce and our workforce in other areas. We push them away to get trained and then we tell them they cannot avail of this tax credit because, although the money is coming from the same purse, they are living abroad. Similarly, we are trying to encourage student mobility across this island, but students who are studying in the North are not eligible for it either. This is wholly wrong and it is against what was done in the higher education Bill earlier this year. It completely contravenes its efforts to encourage student mobility. It is against the recommendations in the report the ESRI did recently on student mobility as well. We are telling people to do this, but we will discriminate against them when it comes to being able to avail of the refundable tax credit. It is wholly and totally wrong and it is putting families into poverty.

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