Martin Conway (Fine Gael)

I thank the Minister. I can call him Minister now. The last time he was in this Chamber, I referred to him as Minister even though he was Chair of a committee. He might remember it because I did not recognise him. I always knew he would be a Minister, so I congratulate him. As he knows, I advocate a lot for people with disabilities. As somebody with a disability I benefited enormously from the opportunity to go to college in a time when you had to really work hard because very few with disabilities, and certainly very few with vision impairments, got to go to college or university. That situation has sadly not changed dramatically. While the technologies and so on have improved, unfortunately the numbers per head of population of visually impaired and blind people getting to university are not getting to the level they should. I was delighted to be part of launching a bursary and I have run fundraisers to fund a separate bursary run by Vision Ireland to fund so many students per year. I think it is a grant of €1,500 per year as a grant towards Saturday work because many of them cannot get Saturday work. If they did, it would compromise their ability to study and pass their exams.I would like to see some sort of task force put in place to look at people with sensory disabilities and why the numbers of deaf people, blind people and people with disabilities in further education are not improving. Our universities are accessible. They are wheelchair accessible and the lifts, libraries and so on are accessible but, sadly, we are not seeing the numbers going to college that we should be seeing. The HEAR programme is very welcome.

I am conscious that I have very little time. There is an awful lot more I would like to say but we need to look at paid graduate placement programmes for people with disabilities to prove to industry, business and so on that, once they get the opportunity, they are very capable of doing the job. I wish the Minister well. I really believe he is going to be a transformative Minister for further and higher education. I wish him the best of luck.