Mairéad Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)

In the run-up to the general election, the Government parties made all of these promises about how they were going to get rid of student fees. The Tánaiste even said in November that he would return to genuinely free fees and that this would be done over the lifetime of the next Government if he was returned to power. What do we have instead? The first thing we hear is that promise being reneged upon.

The Minister also said that he has spent his time listening to all of the students who are here, that he has listened to the students' unions and that he will continue to engage with students' unions over the course of the summer. Yet, when he talked about the challenges we face as a State, he did not mention students, their families or their financial hardship once. The Minister says he wants to focus on access to education. He should see one thing. When he prices people out of access to third level education, he is limiting their access. I will give him a bit of a history lesson. I started university in 2008. In 2008, there was a massive students' movement that knew free education was going to be absolutely and utterly demolished by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We held protests in NUI Galway and on the streets of Dublin because we knew exactly what they were planning to do. They are proving us right again and again. I raised this with the Minister's two predecessors on numerous occasions. I told them they were only going to do it as a once-off, that they did not care and that they were not going to do it for the long term. The Minister has just proven he will continue doing exactly that. We do not need to hear his bluff and bluster. He should just do it, deal with the motion tonight and cut fees.

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