Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to welcome the Minister of State and congratulate her on her appointment to her new position. I want to welcome our guests in the Visitors Gallery. I also want to welcome this Private Members' Bill and, in particular, its clear calls for publicly funded third level education and a rejection of any notion of introducing student loan schemes.

I need to begin by addressing Labour's history on this, which is unfortunate, particularly in light of the progressive work that was done in the 1990s. When Labour secured the portfolio of education in government and broke the pledge in regard to fees, approving an increase in student contribution fees year-on-year for five years, it did not just do a disservice to tens of thousands of students and their families, or to the people who voted for Labour; it did a disservice to politics by encouraging the common belief that any politician's promise is not worth the paper it is written on. We all need to do better than that.

Under that Fine Gael-Labour coalition, State funding of third level education plummeted by an incredible 25%. Grants were cut, students who were dependent upon that assistance went months without help and many dropped out of college altogether - they were literally priced out of education. We now have a situation in which participation from those in the lower socioeconomic groupings in our society is at 26%, while we have practically full participation from those born into the higher professional grouping. At present access to third level is not on merit, it is a lottery based upon which family and which area you were born into, and that level of gross inequality is Government policy driven.

Education at third level is not a privilege; it is a right. It is the State's responsibility to ensure that all of our children should have access to that right, irrespective of socioeconomic background, disability, gender, ethnicity or age. As the largest party of the left in this country, Sinn Féin wants to build a consensus among progressive parties and garner broad support for an education system which should be fully publicly funded and accessible to all citizens. We support the call for a truly publicly funded higher education system and we are also committed to opposing any move to implement an income-contingent loan scheme to fund third level.

It is deeply concerning that this House is divided on the subject of income-contingent loans. That division is evident in the cynical political manoeuvring of Fianna Fáil's amendment and the ideologically driven Fine Gael amendment. We understand Fine Gael's opposition to the motion. It is a right-wing party so it will favour a student loans model. If Fine Gael had its way, it would hand over third level education lock, stock and barrel to big business to run as they see fit. I want to make it clear that we are fully aware of the politics at play here this evening and that Fianna Fáil - the flip-flop party - does not want to see a vote on Labour's motion because then it would have to show its hand regarding student loans. It is a joke that the Fianna Fáil counter-motion takes no position on the income-contingent loans model. Yes, it says it can be very uncertain but what exactly does that mean? The loans model is at the very centre of the Labour Bill and Fianna Fáil has cynically tried to avoid the whole issue.

I am sure we are all aware of the massive failure which these loans have been in every country in which they have been introduced. In England student debt rocketed from Stg£12.2 billion in 2001 to Stg£86.2 billion in 2016, and it is expected that 70% of those students will never pay back their loans. New Zealand has now made it a criminal offence to default on loans and officers are waiting at airports in Australia to arrest graduates flying home for funerals and weddings. What sort of a Ponzi scheme is that? The participation level of the lowest socioeconomic grouping in Australia has fallen to 16%, much lower even than our own, while in Britain, for the first time ever, 2013 saw a decrease in participation from the poorest section of society, those who are in receipt of the free school allowance. This model exacerbates inequality. Not only that, but fresh research from Trinity College Dublin has suggested that Ireland's economy and culture would be the perfect storm of chaos in which to introduce such a model.

This model will not work in a country that has, first, a history of emigration, as graduates will just leave, second, a culture of high levels of personal debt and, third, an economy characterised by low wages and precarious employment. Furthermore, research carried out by Larkin and Corbet in 2015 suggested that, for such a model to work in Ireland, we would need at the most a default rate of 15%. Considering the British default rate is as high as 70%, this is really just fantasy economics. On the other hand, the empirical evidence on our side behind publicly funded third level education has been proved time and time again to be economically sound. There is a reason the Nordic countries pay their students to go to university. There is a reason Germany has free third level education, not only for its own citizens but even for those who live outside of Germany. The reason is that education is not simply a cost; it is an investment from which the State will see a return, that is, if graduates do not flee the country afterwards.

I want to address the questions submitted by Senator Maria Byrne, namely, how do we pay for a fully publicly funded education system? I have to put it to the Senator that it is about political choices. Fine Gael thinks its more important to fund corporate welfare, so it gifts the hotel industry €600 million per year via a VAT tax break so that tourists can secure a single bed hotel room tonight for €170, if they are lucky, and it gifts multinational corporations actual tax rates as low as 2%, as opposed to the official rate of 12.5%. We could introduce a third tier of income tax for those individuals earning over €100,000; in fact, that used to be Labour Party policy. We could also reverse the lowering of the threshold for inheritance tax, which would be a real statement of challenging inequality.

In conclusion, this debate is very welcome as it shines a light on the ideological divide in this Chamber. It is the progressive left against the hard right. All of us on the left need to be more ambitious. It is not good enough to settle for propping up one or other of the conservative parties in government. We need to work together to offer a real alternative to the electorate on education and a whole host of other key social and economic issues. I commend this motion, which will have our full support.