Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House in her new position, which is a much-needed role.I would like to start by thanking the Labour Party Senators for tabling this crucial motion and allowing us to debate what is essentially the heart of the question on the future of higher education funding in this country. I believe that how a state funds higher education reflects the values intrinsic to it and the importance that it places on the personal and social development of all its citizens. The social, cultural and financial benefit of education on society is much greater than the individual gain. What education provides to this State as a collective and all that it creates should result in it being Ireland's most powerful and worthwhile investment. Every graduate goes on to have an impact, whether they are nurses, social workers, artists, teachers or politicians. Education has a limitless multiplying on effect on society. Education is a state's greatest investment and should never be viewed as a cost in the traditional sense. Even the individual benefit of an education has an impact on society, such as a person having improved health, paying greater tax, being less likely to need social welfare assistance, being more likely to have children who attend third level education and having more disposable income that will contribute to the economic activity of the country. Society benefits at every point from education. Education is a state's greatest investment, not our greatest cost.

The Union of Students in Ireland runs a campaign called Education Is where people are encouraged to share what education is for them and the impact that it has. For me, education is possibility. It makes change, success, this House, entrepreneurship, life-saving medicine, scientific breakthroughs, and our poets and artists possible. Education is possibility. Education is a state's greatest investment, not our greatest cost. Education is transformative and its transformative nature can change the world. It can transform poverty and people, it can transform helplessness into power and hopelessness into action, it can transform inter-generational poverty and it transforms possibility into actuality. It is only when we turn possibility into actuality that we have change. I only have to look at the transformation that it has had on my own life and that the impact that free fees have had on my life to know its transformative power. Education is a state's greatest investment, not our greatest cost.

Education is life-saving. Every day, students and graduates do amazing and incredible things. Graduates change and save lives, from legislation and policy to services for the most vulnerable. Every year, thousands of students graduate from university. They will change lives and impact on society positively every day for the rest of their days, not just affecting change here in Ireland but also responding to humanitarian crises and global challenges all over the world. Education is a state's greatest investment, not our greatest cost.

Plato believed that the highest goal of education is the knowledge of the good, and that is what education is. It is the highest form of all that is good and all that should be a public good. Plato also believed that the state is an educational community. The state itself is created by education and it can only survive on the condition that all citizens receive an education that enables them to make rational political decisions. It is up to us to make those rational decisions.

For me, education is a great equaliser and I think, as legislators, we have a political responsibility as well as a moral one to ensure the existence of an accessible and well-funded public education system that works for the betterment of society and all its citizens. That being said, we can probably always have the ideological argument over how we pay for third level education. However, when it comes to the central question that is before education policy makers today - whether to introduce an income contingent loan scheme - it is abundantly clear that the international evidence shows such schemes are bad policy, plain and simple.