David Norris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State with responsibility for lifelong education. Many mature people are going back to college. I would like to raise two specific cases, the first of which relates to a woman who was born and educated in Ireland and lived here for some years. She has recently returned to Ireland after spending four years abroad working with a voluntary organisation. When she applied for a place in one of our universities, she was told she was being assessed as a non-EU student because she had spent four years doing good work outside this country. That seems to me to be thoroughly insane. This is the kind of person who should be encouraged. I suggest she has been deemed to be a non-EU student so that the fees being extracted from her could be tripled. I ask the Minister of State to investigate this anomaly.

The second case I would like to raise relates to a woman who has been offered a place in my university, Trinity College. The difficulty is that she does not receive financial assistance of any kind to return to university to get another degree, as we are urging people to do. As a result of paying to do her first degree on her own initiative, she cannot get the back to education grant and does not qualify for what are known as free fees. She is working part-time to make money to return to college and, as a result, does not even receive social welfare assistance. While I welcome whatever the Government can do to support third level education, anomalies raised by public representatives, whether they are in the Central Applications Office, grants system or social welfare system, must be examined and ironed out.