Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad that some young people are in the Visitors Gallery. I do not know whether they are Irish but what I am about to say might inform them. Are the Senators aware that the great Bank of Ireland is doubling the interest rate it charges graduate entries to medicine when they qualify? That is financial thuggery at its best. In other words, it is telling graduates who want to continue studying that they will get the loan at a certain interest rate but within three months of completing the course, the rate will be doubled. I want the Minister for Finance or the Minister for Education and Skills to come into the House to address this issue. It is not only doubling the interest rate but it is also picking rates out of the sky. According to the Medical Independent, graduate entry medical students are buried in a ditch of debt because of this. Some 65% of all our young doctors have left the country not only to seek better conditions and better lives but also because they cannot repay these enormous loans.

Education is the right of everybody. We have, of course, to pay for it, and that includes graduates, but to take the 4.5% interest rate for entrants to graduate medicine and then increase it to 6%, 7% or 9%, to be repaid over ten years, chokes the graduates of this country and beggars them before they even begin. It is financial thuggery. Bank of Ireland is back where it began. When I pointed out to its representatives last week that it had received €3.75 billion out of a universal social charge on all of our wages, they stared blankly at me but they are quite capable of running around America after builders who owe them the millions of euro that they gave out like nuts at a circus tent and of beggaring our graduate students. This is extremely important because parents in this country do not have the money to send children to universities in their areas and thus have to send them to other cities. They need to borrow money not for credit but for education. I want the Minister for Education and Skills to outline how she intends to address this issue and I am looking for an amendment to the Order of Business on that account. It is financial thuggery. No Senator should vote against me on the Order of Business because the issue is above politics.