In the sense that this Bill merely legislates retrospectively for a situation which already exists the Minister may try to describe it as a non-controversial measure. I would agree very much indeed with Senator Murphy that that depends on how you view the subject, and for those who are deeply concerned, as is the Labour Party, with the inequality of access to third-level education, with the distorted way in which the present system operates, this has to be a very controversial Bill because it is going to do nothing to counter the inequity and imbalance in the present system.
It is regrettable the Minister has decided to introduce a Bill because that is a complicated process—it has to go through both Houses—and has chosen to structure it in such a very narrow way. I propose, first of all, to speak in more general terms about the position relating to access to third-level education in Ireland and then to relate my remarks specifically to what the Minister could have done at the very least, in introducing a Bill called the Local Authorities (Higher Education Grants) Bill, 1978. The very least he could have done—as I shall explain—is to abolish the four honours eligibility requirement for grants to the approved courses to which he will extend the legislation, namely, to the RTCs and COTs.
First of all, let us look at the background picture relating to higher education in Ireland. In doing so I am indebted to the Union of Students of Ireland, as I think a number of other Senators are, for very useful material which makes the case which they want to bring before the public, the unanswerable case, that in the youngest and fastest-growing country in the European Community we have blatant discrimination in access to third-level education; we have inherited privilege and unnecessary and unacceptable criteria for that access. We are steadily worsening the situation by not having the grants for third-level education keeping pace with the cost of living and not ensuring that the means test is a realistic one for 1978 and into 1979. The situation is a very bad one indeed, is getting worse very steadily and is doing so in the context of a country with a population 50 per cent of which is under 25 and—perhaps an even more relevant statistic—39 per cent of which is under 19. So the challenge is clearly there. We should be doing a very different kind of thing in this country at present. We should be examining every aspect of our economic and social development to see how far we can ensure that every last penny that can possibly be spared goes into education of our young in every possible way—improving the ratio of teachers and pupils at primary level, improving access and facilities there, improving access at secondary level and improving and correcting the present imbalance in access to education at the third-level. That would make a great deal of political sense if we want to have a basic social cohesion as a people—it is as important as that—if we want to realise the challenge of our economic and social development in a very complex world, where we need an educated labour force, where we need skilled people, where we need a very adaptable labour force—technicians and those who would contribute to expanding the economic life of the country for the benefit of all our people.
These are the kind of urgent considerations which just will not wait. Instead, the picture is one of diminution in Government expenditure in education generally and specifically in third-level education. It displays a lack of any attempt to ensure that student grants and the means test for eligibility for grants keep even some linkage with the cost of living. The effect of this is that there is a decline in our third-level institutions of students supported by State funds. I propose to put on the record of the House figures illustrating this which have been compiled by the Union of Students in Ireland. It is very important indeed that we, the representatives of the people and the people, through a debate in this House, know what the situation is and are made aware of the very crucial social problems and indeed the political lunacy of not redirecting the focus on education and vastly expanding the facilities and access to education.
An assessment has been prepared of the percentage of students receiving financial aid from the State. The figures show a comparison between the years 1975, 1976 and 1977. For the universities the percentage in 1975 was 22.5 per cent; in 1976 it went up to 23 per cent; in 1977 it came down to 22 per cent. I will be interested if the Minister can fill in the figure for 1978. For the RTCs and COTs, the percentage of students receiving financial aid from the State in 1975 was 27 per cent; in 1976 it was 27.5 per cent; in 1977 it had gone down to 22 per cent. In the first-and second-level teacher education, the primary teacher training, the percentage of students receiving financial aid from the State in 1975—and here for complex reasons there are the two figures but the figures again decline—72 per cent, declining in 1976 to 68 per cent, declining in 1977 sharply to 61 per cent. Therefore, the percentage in all third-level institutions of students receiving financial aid from the State goes down from 29.5 per cent in 1975 to 29 per cent in 1976, and a more sharp drop, 27.5 per cent in 1977. This must illustrate, more than any words alone can do, what is happening effectively in third-level education—the lack of a realistic student grant. I would accept as moderate the figure of £900 which is the assessment given by USI of the basic living grant on which a student can attend a third-level institution, pay for his or her accommodation and live, without any particular luxuries.
The present grants and the very outdated and unrealistic means test and level of eligibility exclude a very considerable number of students whose parents may not seem to be precisely on the poverty line. But they cannot, in present circumstances, afford to support a student during that student's time at third-level education. The number who are able to avail of State-financing declines because they are caught just outside the means test eligibility. Therefore, they are victims of the system. Similarly, in the case of the RTCs and COTs there is a most illogical exclusion, that is, the four honours exclusion. This type of prerequisite to getting a State grant to go on for technical education does not make any sense. First of all it does not acknowledge the value of technical education, the different criteria, the different approach; very often, the different strengths of the individual who will go on for technical education. It is applying a criterion— one type of criterion—which is for an academic stream.
The subjects in which a student may get honours could be completely unrelated to the question of going on for technical education. Similarly, a student who wants to go on to take a course in a regional technical college may be an excellent student when assessed by the kind of criteria that the technical college itself would apply, would definitely gain entry to the college, but cannot avail of a grant because of the completely unsuitable prerequisite of having four honours in academic subjects in the Leaving Certificate. The Minister has not advanced the cause of higher education, has not improved in any way the eligibility for higher education, in the Bill before the House today. I can accept that he may wish to introduce the provisions relating to the amount of the grant, the extension of scholarship or the means test eligibility by regulations at a different time. But I would have thought that any measure relating to extending the grants scheme, to legislate retrospectively for the fact that the RTCs are covered already, with some anomalies, afforded the Minister an opportunity which he had a very deep responsibility to assume, an opportunity to recognise the difference, to allow technical education to come of age in Ireland, indeed to endorse what I think is an increasingly widely-felt view that we must, as a country, emphasise and increase access to and facilities in the area of technical training and education in order to provide the opportunities to our young and the opportunities for economic and social development of this country so desperately needed in the whole economic sphere.
The Minister had that responsibility when he was deciding to introduce a Bill to legislate for extending the grants scheme to other approved courses. He has failed in that responsibility by retaining an illogical qualification which does not make any sense to the individual going on to the technical college, which is not an entry requirement of the technical college and which has the very undesirable effect of continuing a privileged, streamed access so that it is still beyond the reach and scope of the numbers of students coming up who would otherwise avail of the opportunity to go to technical college. Obviously to remove the four honours requirement would be to increase the number of those who would apply for local authority grants and would involve the costing of the scheme and the expenditure.
Here it is relevant to examine the figures regarding expenditure in education, to see that in this area of social expenditure, far from the budget increasing in proportion to the demands, needs and physical description of us as a people, a demand which recognises our very substantial youth and the fact that there is no longer the level of emigration there was, the fact that the birth rate is continuing at a higher level than in other countries, that the population will continue to increase and to require to be educated to the end of the century.
The figures with which we are faced in looking at expenditure in education and the Green Paper predictions are running counter to the real situation, the real demand on the ground. It is very hard to reconcile this with the priorities of the present Government. I believe, and the Labour Party believe, that you cannot dissociate the Government attitude towards education generally, and access to higher education, from the whole approach to the economic and social planning of the country. We believe that if there is going to be the possibility of diverting adequate resources to educate and to provide equality of access to education to this growing number of our young population, not from the privilege of their birth but as a right as young citizens to have access to education, to have equality of that access and to have the bias in favour of those who cannot afford to pay fees or to cover the cost of accommodation—if we are going to change that—then I do not think it can be done by a Government which appears to be prepared to structure their economic strategy on fostering a consumer boom by an elite, of a band of about 30 or 40 per cent of the population who are made dramatically better off as a strategy so that they may consume more and therefore generate the need for more production the need for a so-called economic growth based on that.
I believe that the strategy of making the better off in our society dramatically more affluent through the various measures taken—the removal of car tax, the removal of rates on private dwellings, the retention of the highest band of income tax, 60 per cent, the removal of wealth tax, the removal of a partial effect of capital gains tax, the increase in personal allowances at the higher level, all of these have generated more consumer spending, more money freely floating around. We have seen evidence of this. One only has to go to a race meeting to see the amount of money, at a certain level, which is in free flow, where people have no problem in spending at a certain level. This has to be contrasted with the lack of priorities in where we should be spending any resources of the State. It is not merely a question of spending the money. It is a question of ensuring that, as a people, we understand where our priorities should be and why they should be there. The problem in debating education—it has been said and I think there is some truth in it—that it is a subject that empties the House at times—it is both too complex a problem, too difficult to tackle because once you start talking about third-level education you have somebody else who says: well my priority would be primary education. This is a problem, that of trying to relate a discussion on education to our present economic and social context. I believe this is more urgent, more basically critical in Ireland today than it has been since the foundation of the State. We have changed so substantially in our demographic structure and yet we have have not changed sufficiently in our perception of ourselves.
We do not see this country as being a very young country. We do not see this country as being a country with a lower expenditure in education than the other countries with whom we are in an alliance in the context of the European Economic Community. I do not think people would know, if asked, that the percentage of State-financed students in our third-level institutions has gone down since 1975. I think there would be a great deal of surprise, that people would say: that cannot be so; there must have been an increase in expenditure in third-level education.
It is hard to believe that students could really be expected to live and be able to follow their courses of studies on the present maximum maintenance allowances. The maximum maintenance allowance in 1978 and 1979 is £500 for somebody away from home and £200 living at home. The maximum fees allowance is £289, except for certain courses, medical, veterinary or dental courses in Trinity or in the NUI. To anybody who is trying to budget in present circumstances, with the increase in the cost of living in recent years, that is not by anybody's standards a minimum living allowance. The effect of that is to make still more privileged, still more narrow, access to third-level education, and I believe that there was a fairly high expectation of the present Minister for Education when he came into office, that he was seen as a man with a certain vision to improve access to education and in particular to provide a focus and a structure which would lead to an improvement in equality of access to education.
Whether it is because he cannot persuade his Cabinet colleagues to assist him in the matter or because he has not been following through with that mission, I do not think he is redressing a bad situation. I think he is allowing it to drift and become a worse situation, a situation of still narrower access, a situation which in a country that was about to become a republic allows us to build into the system a degree of privilege which would be very seriously questioned in any country which genuinely proported to treat all its citizens equally. We do not treat all our citizens equally, and nowhere is that more dramatic than in the overall picture of access to education and distribution of our resources in relation to the amount we spend on education generally and specifically, since we are talking about it here in the House today, on third-level education.
It is not too late for the Minister. He could still introduce an amendment to this Bill to abolish the four honours entry requirement for technical education. This would not dramatically affect the position in relation to universities because the universities have, as we all know, an increasingly high entry requirement anyway. There is great pressure on places at the university level and the universities are increasingly upping already very high requirements, and this in itself is causing very real difficulties. But it would have a dramatic effect in opening up access to the technical colleges in giving us the skilled, trained, educated young work force that we so desperately need as a country and it would show our young people that we have some sense of social priorities, that we have some sense of what the focus of our attention as a people should be.
The Labour Party will be tabling amendments to this Bill at the Committee Stage, and one of these amendments will relate to what Senator Murphy rightly referred to as the very vague and worrying new power which the Minister has taken in relation to approving an institution or a course in an institution to include also the approval of university courses. It may be that the Bill was unintentionally drafted in an ambiguous way, but I, like Senator Murphy, would read from the Bill the possibility that the Minister might reserve for himself a discretion whether to approve for the future an existing course in a university institution. I think this would have a disasterous effect on university autonomy. It is something that is not necessary or desirable, particularly in the relationship between the State and university institutions. We can provide the proper focus of equality of access through proper distribution of resources of the country without impinging on basic university autonomy. The Labour Senators have also been trying, within the constraints imposed on them, to amend a Bill in this House without imposing a further charge on the public expenditure—to broaden the scope of this Bill—because it seems to me a regrettable waste of the time of both Houses to have a Bill going through which merely legislates the status quo when we know so well that that status quo is inequitable and unequal and should not be tolerated in our very young and hopefully democratic society.
