Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein)
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447. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the parameters under which DARE programme places are allocated in Munster Technological University (details supplied). [45668/22]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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The Disability Access Route to Education (DARE) is operated by the Irish Universities Association (IUA) on behalf of the higher education institutions who set the policy criteria for the scheme. Further information on IUA is available here www.iua.ie.

Admissions under the scheme are regulated by the higher education institutions themselves. Each institution determines its own admissions policy in relation to the scheme, the number of places they reserve and the allocation of those places.

Applications to the scheme are submitted to the Central Applications Office (CAO) who coordinate the scheme for participating institutions.

Therefore it does not come within the remit of the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, myself as Minister or my officials to intervene in individual cases.

However officials in my Department have made contact with the CAO in respect of the Deputy's question and the following information has been provided:

"In the case of this applicant, there could also have been a number of other DARE eligible applicants (who have also therefore evidenced that their disability has impacted their post-primary school experience) who came closer i.e. they were within 11, 10, 9 etc. points of the threshold for that particular course at MTU Cork irrespective of where the applicant was ordinarily resident. As our guidelines state the number of points a particular course is reduced by is dependent on a number of factors, such as;

The overall number of places on the course;

The number of reserved DARE places on the course;

The number of DARE eligible applicants competing for these reserved places."