Education access and inner-city inequality
Senator Ruane praised the student protests against fees, called for action on SUSI and the Cassells report, and then objected to remarks by a Minister of State about an inner-city school for bankers' children. A light interjection from Senator Daly was absorbed into the exchange.
I would like to raise a number of matters. First, I congratulate the Union of Students in Ireland for having got more than 10,000 people out on the streets yesterday in the fight for free education and access to education and to show students' distaste of the possibility of third level loans being introduced. I know that the education committee is due to discuss the Cassells report, but something must be done in the interim. We need to go back to the Minister for Education and Skills and consider the bureaucracy in the likes of Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI. I received very distressed emails from mature students. I received one this morning from a nurse who was about to quit third year. It will be a loss to this country to lose nurses owing to bureaucracy in the likes of SUSI which was set up by the State to provide access for students who needed it. SUSI insists every year on treating this nurse as not being a dependant of her mother, with whom she has not lived for years, but she has always looked after herself and lives on her own. It is a real shame that we cannot set up a system under which we could give the most vulnerable students the access they need. I also have a handwritten letter from a young child in fourth year who is quite distressed. It is a shame that the emotional well-being of someone so young is being affected because he is so worried about how he will access third level education three years from the time at which he is even due to consider it. We should come together and support the likes of the students who were outside Leinster House yesterday seeking reform in the education system.
I also read this morning a very exciting article which I showed to Senator Mark Daly about Deputy Jack Chambers who has circulated a policy seeking to relax the criminalisation of drug addicts. I hope the other Fianna Fáil Members in the Chamber will take some heed of the younger people in the party when the Bill with this aim which Senator Aodhán Ó Ríordáin and I are to introduce is brought before the House.
Comment on this
Is the Senator saying we are not young? That is very disappointing.
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I would also like the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, to come before the House to discuss a disgraceful article he wrote in which he suggested we should have a school in the inner city only for the children of international bankers. I could not believe what I was reading, that a Fine Gael Minister of State would suggest widening the huge deprivation and inequality already present in the area and make it even more observable than it already was. It is hard enough for children growing up there to look at the IFSC and know that they will never be employed there or be part of it without a Minister of State suggesting the placing of a school there that would segregate people from abroad coming here to live or work from the ordinary citizens of the north inner city.